Long tail evolution
I recently gave a presentation on the evolution of the long tail, concluding that the long tail is getting longer, but the 'head' is getting bigger. The reasons for the increasing length of the long tail are clear: there are more people online, they are spending more time online …
Context & Ripple Effects
This Hitwise presentation lands mid-argument rather than out of nowhere. Chris Anderson's camp had been refining the thesis since at least the 2005 'standing out in a commodity crowd' post, and by February 2006 the question was already whether anything comes after the blockbuster — the 'nichebuster' framing that treated niches as products in their own right.
By June 2007, TechCrunch's 'long tail is getting fatter' piece had pushed the debate from theory toward measured traffic data, which is exactly the ground Hitwise occupies. Today's conclusion — a longer tail alongside a bigger head — reframes the fat-tail claim as two simultaneous shifts driven by audience growth, not a redistribution from one end to the other.
First-order effects
- Sites competing for top-of-distribution traffic face a head that is growing, not eroding — the biggest destinations are capturing more absolute visits even as niche queries proliferate.
- Search marketers and niche publishers get a larger addressable pool of low-volume queries, but only if they can find and serve terms that no single keyword report would surface.
Second-order effects
- Aggregators and portals gain leverage twice over: they win scale in the fattening head while their index depth lets them monetize the lengthening tail, squeezing pure-play niche sites on both fronts.
- Advertising and analytics vendors face demand for tools that price and measure long-tail inventory, since the old head-only media planning model no longer describes where attention sits.
Third-order effects
- If both ends keep expanding with internet population growth, distribution economics bifurcate structurally: scale players consolidate the head while portfolio strategies — many small properties rather than one big bet — become the rational play for everyone else.
- Traffic-measurement firms like Hitwise position themselves as the arbiters of this shape, making aggregate clickstream data a strategic input for media buyers rather than a research curiosity.
The trend: As the online population grows, demand distribution widens at both ends at once — a longer tail of niche intent coexisting with a bigger, more concentrated head.