"Long Tail" phenomenon has long legs

NEW YORK, Dec 11 (Reuters) Fans of the popular US TV show ''Desperate Housewives'' may be dying to discuss last night's episode, but the odds are that their friends and co-workers watched something else.

As technology makes production, storage and distribution of entertainment easier, choices are abounding, and so are audiences for alternatives to hit TV shows -- and songs, books or movies.

While a cooking program or a nature documentary is unlikely to pose a challenge to ''Desperate Housewives,'' in the aggregate, niche markets are becoming a force to be reckoned with in a number of industries.

Chris Anderson, the editor in chief of Wired Magazine, made these points in an October 2004 article for his magazine and expanded them into a book, ''The Long Tail,'' published in July.

The title refers to ''long-tailed distribution,'' a statistical term describing how a typical demand curve starts with a large ''head'' -- the hits -- and trails off into a long ''tail'' -- everything else.

Conventional wisdom says that the top 20 per cent of a company's products account for 80 per cent of sales. But Anderson notes that more people are dipping into esoteric fare as the Internet and other technology make it easier to find, produce and distribute.

Both the book and article have prompted much discussion on the extent and impact of the tail.

''The most common misunderstanding of the theory is that it predicts the hits will die, and it doesn't,'' Anderson told Reuters. ''It predicts the monopoly of hits is over.'' NETFLIX, RHAPSODY The long tail is at work in Netflix Inc, a new-economy company that rents DVDs to its monthly subscribers. The company has said that it moves more than 95 percent of its 65,000 titles at least once per quarter.

Another example is RealNetworks Inc.'s Rhapsody, a subscription-based digital music service that offers 3 million tracks from well over 100,000 artists, 90 per cent of whom have found an audience, however small.

Similarly, Canadian vanity publisher Lulu produces books for small audiences.

Anderson initially coined the phrase ''long tail'' to describe the new economics of media and entertainment. He argues, however, that the theory applies to numerous other businesses, including appliances, foods, toys and even employment, saying offshoring is ''the long tail of labor.'' ''Demand is shifting the down the tail,'' Anderson said.

''Sometimes that means from hits to niches, sometimes that means from new releases to back catalog. In all cases, it's clearly a trend.'' In some cases, the effect has been quite dramatic.

As recently as 20 years ago, for example, one out of three US television households tuned into ''The Bill Cosby Show,'' according to Nielsen Media Research. Enter the Internet and a proliferation of cable networks, which left fewer than one out of five households watching the Tuesday night ''American Idol,'' the top-rated series for 2005-2006.

In the music business, a hit is also less of a hit these days, now that a vast selection of material is available for downloading.

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