The “long tail” economics challenge comprehension

Publishing 2.0 � The Long Tail of Revenue 2.0

Much is made of the ability of ‘Web 2.0’ companies to monetise (ugh) the ‘long tail’ of the web. It’s such an old saw now that it’s becoming axiomatic, but every now and then it pays to question how this can work in practice. Publishing 2.0 has a nice article, based on his breaking the ‘magic 500 inward links’ (I didn’t even know that was a metric. oops).

If you base the math on 41.4 million blogs, Publishing 2.0 is in the top 0.006% of all blogs based on being linked to by only 0.001% of all blogs! That’s some wacky math.

Worth a read and a ponder.