Advertising to 'the long tail'
Posted 18 May 2007 at 9:04AM by Simon Dickson in Doing business online
Should you spend your advertising budget buying spots on high-traffic sites, or seeking out smaller, more relevant audiences? There's some interesting food for thought in an article just published by the Internet Advertising Bureau.
People are getting smarter at using the net, it muses. The top ten online brands account for more than a third of all visitor sessions, but we all have a couple of sites related to our personal interests which we visit every few days. And as Chris Anderson described in a landmark article for Wired Magazine, published in 2004:
The average Barnes and Noble (bookshop) carries 130,000 titles. Yet more than half of Amazon's book sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles. Consider the implication: if the Amazon statistics are any guide, the market for books that are not even sold in the average bookstore is larger than the market for those that are.
Or to put it another way, you don't need to be the biggest; you can make just as much money (or more!) by serving small niche markets very well. By the same thinking, says the IAB, 'special interest sites might not deliver massive audiences to advertisers, but can deliver more relevant audiences to the right advertisers.'
Tags: advertising, adwords, chris anderson, long tail
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