The attention economy and the long tail effect

Feel like quitting your job and starting your own business online? That’s exactly was Jeff Bezos did and now his net worth is a growing US$157.4billion. Bezos saw the growth of the internet and realised more and more people would be going online in the future, and so Amazon was created; the world’s largest internet company. How wild is that?

The term ‘Long Tail Effect’ was coined by Chris Anderson in 2004, allowing businesses to profit from selling a smaller amount of ‘hard to find’ items to many customers instead of selling large volumes of a reduced number of popular items.

Before the internet, there was no other way to buy something other than physically going into a shop and purchasing it. Since the internet, there have been endless possibilities and you are able to buy pretty much anything if you look for it and this is evident through the emergence and rise of mass social media. ‘The internet imposes no barriers to entry, no economies of scale and no limits on supply’ (Clay Shirky).

Mitew, T (2020), ‘The Attention Economy and the Long Tail Effect,’ lecture slides week 6, BCM206, University of Wollongong

‘Long Tail’, https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/long-tail.asp, Accessed September, 2020