Business - Written Wednesday, March 4, 2009 by Denis Hancock - 11 Comments

Putting the YouTube Long Tail in Perspective

I recently wrapped up a study looking at the Long Tail on YouTube, and one of the key findings was that – from a marketing perspective – it (being the Long Tail) might not be as important as some people think. I’ve been trying to come up with easy ways to demonstrate why this might be, which has been quite a challenge – but below is one of my best shots at a starting point.

To give some background, last year ViralManager.com did a study where they indexed a “large number” of YouTube videos, and counted how many views they got in the first month. If you just look at the graphic they provided, it appears to be a compelling long tail story – it drops of really quick through the top 10%, then has a thick “long tail” that extends out through the next 90%. However, if you look at it closely, you’ll note that the scale on the Y-axis does not increase arithmetically, but rather geometrically. In other words, each mark is 10x higher than the previous (i.e. it goes from 10 to 100 to 1,000, and so on). So I did some quick math to give an indication of what it would REALLY look like on an arithmetic scale:

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