Filtering, aggregating, searching, and monetizing the Long Tail
December 14th, 2005 4:38pmDavid Hornik asks: Where’s the Money in the Long Tail?
It is certainly the case that in the aggregate, Long Tail content is extraordinarily valuable. The question for VCs and entrepreneurs is “for whom?”
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The real money is in aggregation and filtering and those will continue to be interesting businesses for the foreseeable future.
He points out that aggregators are building convenient one-stop shopping for people looking for topically-focused content, and derive economic value even when the content publishers do not.
David Beisel follows the money a little further:
…in the long run, the value of the network is not only determined by the number of nodes in it, but in the ability for the network to monetize those nodes.
…in calculating the value of a network, any equation describing it should contain a variable with the monetization rate (or proxied by the value to the user which can be monetized in the future). So while the number of nodes in a network surely is a fundamental (if not the majority, in many cases) driver of value, the value of the network itself to the user is also a very important component to the overall total.
