Is One Long Tail Enough? (Cuando Una Long Tail No Es Suficiente)

Abstract

Literature on the Long Tail has focus on the effects of the behavior of their clients and the effect on the company results. One of the main problems on the analysis of the effect is the scarcity of quality data. Most of the analysis has several shortcomings as they only reflect indirect data or they exclusively related to book and the US market. As far as existing literature, it could be an exclusive feature of Amazon. Our analysis widens the scope of the long tail by using comprehensive data by from a unique dataset on the leader of the Spanish DVD online market. The data represent more than five years of transactions and allows estimating the existence of the long tail not only for the total sales of the company but also on 7 large general categories, increasing the richness of the data. We estimate the shape of the distribution and simulate the behavior of the sales over the entire catalogue to construct a demand curve that allows us to show the different behavior on the categories. The results show the existence of Long Tail and other several other observations that were overlooked or impossible to obtain in previous research.

Note: Downloadable document is in Spanish.

Keywords: Long Tail, Niche, Position

JEL Classification: M21, M30, L11