A brief look at new ecommerce opportunities

In 2006 Chris Anderson wrote an article in Wired magazine. The article has led to a book “The

Long Tail” published by Random House

In 1988, Joe Simpson wrote a book called Touching the Void, a harrowing account of near death in the Peruvian Andes.

It got good reviews but, only a modest success.

A decade later Jon Krakauer wrote Into Thin Air, another book about a mountain-climbing tragedy, which became a publishing sensation.

Suddenly Touching the Void started to sell again.

Touching the Void went to sell 2:1 against Into Thin Air

Why?

Amazon recommendations! A few years earlier this could never have

happened and Touching the Void would have disappeared.

Rules of thumb Cinema needs about 750 per week Record store needs to sell 2 copies of CD per

year to pay for the half inch of shelving used Pull

Cinema up to 10 miles Books less than 10 miles DVD less that a mile

Bollywood not successful in USA but there are about 1.7 million Indians living in USA.

There have been Oscar foreign films that never see the light of day outside their own countries.

Until recently hits were the driving force of entertainment.

Still are to certain degree with TV but decline is very evident. Little Britain v Monty Python Startrek v Heroes

But misses are good as well if:

It is easy for people to find them There are no costs (or little) for

production Analyse buying habits and recommend Low costs of storage

iTunes - music eCast – electronic juke boxes Amazon – print on demand Netflix – 100,000 ++DVDs and 12,000 +

+online

The long tail

750,000 tracksWhere Wal-Mart ends – 40,000

No of downloads

ALL of Rhapsody’s tracks get download at least twice a month

Barnes and Nobel carry about 130,000 book titles.

Amazon sells more than half its books outside of this list.

Google makes most of its money from small businesses placing relatively cheap adverts

Netflix rents documentaries – not Blockbuster

New markets for: foreign films anime independent movies British television dramas old American TV sitcoms

Name proposed by Tapscott and Williams in their book “Wikinomics” published by Atlantic Books.

“I’d like to take…all the data we have that goes back to 1948, and put it into a file and share it with the world….and then ask the world to tell us where we are going to find the next six million ounces of gold”

Rob McEwen, CEO Goldcorp, Inc.

Put all survey data on line and asked people to analyse it.

Paid $75,000 to winners. It worked.

Millions of them exist on one form or another

Wikipedia best known Criticized for inaccuracy But has far more information than Encyc Brit Self repairing

People are self driven to help for various motives

New products Use on-line part time scientists and engineers

New ideas for products and services Information examples:

Equine site Tourist site Education site All will be better for collaboration

2000 – two Californian twenty somethings had an idea.

Am I Hot or Not People voted on pictures Used Yahoo Photos at first Used parents to vet photographs

Recruited fans to vet photos Got visitors to email friends

Day 8 - 1.8 Million page views per day Set up Meet Me @ $6 month – revenues

first year $600,000 By 2004 profits looked around

$4,000,000 2006 – 13 billionth vote 2008 they sold it for $20,000,000!

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