If everyone has only one book in them, Steem may be the best place to sell it.

Steem could capture the long tail of content creation

The long tail

We'll keep this bit short but the Long Tail is a statistical concept describing a property of a distribution.

A distribution is said to have a long tail if there are many occurrences which are far from the 'head' or centre of the distribution.

In such cases although any individual case in the long tail may be limited in its scope, the total volume in the tail may be equal or even far greater than the volume in the head.

Head businesses

Historically businesses that were trying to sell products had limited storage space and limited capacity to reach customers. A bookstore located in a town had an immediate reach based on the size of the town and some degree beyond that.

Given limited space, businesses were forced to choose which items to stock based on popularity.

A bookstore would stock the best selling books because they would have to be stored for less time before they sold. More sales per unit space means more profitability for the shop.

These popular products represent the head - the most popular products for the largest group of people. Anyone that likes popular books is served well but everyone else is left underserved.

Long tail businesses

With the advent of the internet and given a prevalence of delivery services it became possible for businesses to stock far more items for a lower cost by buying warehouses on cheap land and delivering to their customers rather than relying on their customers being able to physically reach them to buy items and take them home.

The internet also brought with it the possibility of a far larger audience than ever before. Rather than customers having to physically visit a shop to browse they could instead just go online and see a massive range of items that might suit their particular tastes better than the most popular items.

Everyones tastes can be catered for. Demand for items that are more individual in scope and taste might be small and costly to serve given a small population but given a large audience and cheap storage costs the demand for unpopular or uncommon items can be enormous.

Amazon is a classic example of the benefits of tapping into the demand in the long tail. As one Amazon employee described: "We sold more books today that didn't sell at all yesterday than we sold today of all the books that did sell yesterday.". Put more simply, Amazon made more profit from books that were rarely purchased than books that were commonly purchased. The volume of the tail being greater than the head.

The long tail of content

A long tail in content looks at the other side of this coin and considers: of the content in the world, what constitutes the head and the tail?

For this we could look at the distribution of types of content or content creators but the key lies in the capacity to monetize content.

The monetizability of content has three essential factors:

• the value of the content
• the ease of production
• the ease of sale

If content is very high in value (e.g. custom hand made watches) then high difficulty of production and the relative difficulty of sale is overcome by the high value. The works may be difficult to produce and it may be costly to set up a shop and find customers with wallets deep enough, but if you are able to produce watches which wealthy people see a lot of value in, and so are willing to pay a lot for, it can be profitable to set up a custom watch shop.

If you happen to find videos easy to produce and that the videos you produce interest a lot of people, then you likely can't sell those videos direct to those people but you can create a series on YouTube and monetize large numbers of them through ads quite easily.

The long tail of content then is composed of content where the factors conspire such that it is not profitable to sell that content.

Someone may take good photos but they may not be world-beating enough to sell for thousands to a magazine.

Someone may write great short stories but, knowing it will never be a full time job, is unable to justify the time cost of approaching tens of publishers with a tiny chance of publishing, and even less chance of return.

Someone may write software that serves themselves and a niche group but find that the software isn't valuable enough to sell at a price that justifies the setup and transaction costs, but also doesn't provide enough long term ongoing value to justify users setting up Patreon accounts.

The unmonetized long tail

What is needed in these cases is an easing in one or more of the factors.

Just as the internet allowed Amazon to be physically distant in cheaper land and thus store more products, and at the same time reach a much larger audience, the unmonetized long tail of content requires that either:

1. The value of the content increases
2. The ease of production increases
3. The difficulty of sale decreases

Steem can't make it easier for you to take photos and it can't make your photos better but it can help with the difficulty of sale.

If your content is worth perhaps $1-2 or less to any single person, then transaction and setup costs alone will make it unfeasible to sell it. Steem reduces transaction costs to near zero. Rather than having to get out their wallet and pay you a price for your content, the Steemian can just upvote it instead.

The long tail of unmonetizable content becomes monetizable, but only through a method like Steem.

The unpublished and unwritten long tails

Currently the unmonetized long tail is present on the internet but distributed over millions of blogs, websites and social media sites.

This tail could gradually (or not so gradually) migrate to Steem and become monetized, but there may be an even larger part to this tail - a hidden nine tenths of the iceberg - where people currently choose to either:

1. not post content because they feel it is too valuable to give away for zero reward
2. consider, but not create, content for the same reason

In many cases the very best of the long tail of content won't even be present on the internet, and may not even be created yet. Without any incentive the only content currently present in the long tail is the content that is either valued low enough by its creator, or produced trivially enough to be published for no reward at all.

The most valubale content in the long tail naturally has no home but for Steem and until a platform like Steem appears it would remain absent from the internet.