2010-11-25

What are the Long Tail Effect and Streisand Effect? How are they related to Web 2.0? Give real-life examples how they take place in Web 2.0 age.




In this article, my focus will be on describing the Long Tail Effect and Streisand Effect on the Web nowadays and how they are related to Web 2.0.

Long Tail Effect

The term Long Tail or long tail refers to a phenomenon first described in a Wired article by Chris Anderson in 2004. It talks about how product offerings by a business, usually considered to be "unpopular" because of low sales volumes, can make up a significant portion of an online business because the total volume of the "unpopular" items can be significantly large. The term has become popular in recent times due to the raising trend of adopting the retailing strategy of selling a large number of hard-to-find items in relatively small quantities to customers especially on the World Wide Web. One of the reasons for this gain of popularity is the significant profit that can be gained by using this strategy compared to only selling fewer popular items in large quantities. The total sale of this large number of "non-hit items" is what constitutes the Long Tail Effect that we are talking about.

Long Tail Effect will only work when the cost of inventory storage and distribution is insignificant such that it becomes economically viable to sell relatively unpopular products. This can in turn increase the competitiveness of those unpopular goods and reduce the demand for most of the popular goods. For example, Web content businesses with broad coverage such as Yahoo! and Google may be threatened by the rise of smaller Web sites that focus on the fine details of Web contents and cover the topics better than the larger sites. This is made possible by the creation of easy and cheap Web site software and the spread of RSS which greatly reduce the cost of establishing and maintaining a Web site and the bother encountered by the readers to find these small Web sites on the Internet.

The Long Tail Effect is very much existed in the modern World Wide Web and it is related to Web 2.0 since many of the successful Internet businesses which contribute to the Web 2.0 have leveraged the Long Tail as part of their businesses. Some of the examples include eBay (auctions), Amazon (retail) and iTunes Store (music and podcasts), Yahoo! and Google (web search) which are amongst the major companies, along with smaller Internet companies like Audible (audio books) and Netflix (video rental) and etc.

Take Amazon and Netflix for instance which have made use of the Long Tail Effect since the introduction of Web 2.0 to acquire competitive edge over their neighborhood Blockbuster because of the low overhead cost to stock the exotic and unusal books / DVDs in large centralized warehouses. Contrast to this, Blockbuster has to spend lots of money every month for every square foot of space for their retail stores which are built in visible and thus expensive locations in your neighborhood. These costs are probably multiples of what a larger warehouse in the middle of nowhere costs. Ironically this does not guarantee raising popularity with such heavy spending on inventory storage and in fact Amazon and Netflix are more popular than Blockbuster nowadays due to the convenience provided by their online services which do not require customers to even walk out of their houses to buy their goods.

Streisand Effect

According to Wikipedia, the Streisand effect is primarily an online phenomenon in which an attempt to censor or remove a piece of information which in the end has the unintended consequence of causing the information to be publicized widely and to a greater extent than would have occurred if no censorship had been attempted. It is named after American entertainer Barbra Streisand following a 2003 incident in which her attempts to suppress the photographs of her residence inadvertently generated further publicity.

One of reasons which result in this Streisand effect is the increased accessibility due to Internet especially with the introduction of Web 2.0 technologies such as Tweets, Facebook, Youtube, Forum, BitTorrent and etc. that make exchange of information easier, faster and more open to the public than before. Whenever someone tries to suppress certain information, typically via lawsuits, the blogosphere may intentionally and easily spread the news which usually contains controversial information across the Internet or share with their friends. Ultimately, this may do even more damage to the complainant in terms of reputation than if he has just let the matter slide.

One of the famous real-life examples of Streisand effect that takes place in the Web 2.0 age is the Edison Chen photo scandal which shook the Hong Kong entertainment industry in early 2008. The photo scandal involved the illegal distribution over the Internet of intimate and private photographs of Hong Kong famous actor Edison Chen with various women that include actresses Gillian Chung, Cecilia Cheung, Bobo Chan and etc. The scandal was first started when someone had accidentally gained possession of these intimate photographs and posted them on the Internet to be shared with his friends. This had ultimately led to the distribution of those photographs across the Internet and the news was eventually spread to other Internet users through forwarding the images to the different forums in Hong Kong by the visitors.

The effort of Edison to suppress the distribution of his private photographs has ironically led to more photographs being put onto the Internet and more news coverage on this scandal that makes it one of the hottest topics in the history of Hong Kong entertainment industry. The rapid spread of the news about the scandal and the distribution of the photographs is made possible thanks to the technology provided in the Web 2.0 age such as forum which makes communication among people become much easier and almost in real time and BitTorrent / Foxy which makes the sharing of photographs across different computers on the Internet possible.

The Long Tail Effect and Streisand Effect do exist in today's Web 2.0 world and we all probably have taken part in it at one time or another. For Long Tail Effect, we should learn to take advantage of it especially for small business by for example considering Niche Marketing to maximize business' profit. For Streisand Effect, although it can be prevented by enforcing strict copyright protection on the online content, it does not guarantee total safety as it will be up to the judge or jury to decide what the law says and how it applies in the end. As a result, we should use our common sense when making speeches or posting online content explicitly or implicitly to prevent future confrontations.

References

Posted By： Roman At 5:50 PM

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