Question

What is the long tail? How “long” is the Netflix tail compared to traditional video stores?

Answer 1

Long tail is a type of marketing practice developed by Chris Anderson in 2004 which allows companies to sell less popular products/services to bulk of customers so as to achieve greater profit margins in a 'long tail' format. These type of companies majorly focus on selling larger number of varied products/services instead of only few popular brands or products. These type of strategy are popularly used by various digital platforms like Amazon, Netflix. They usually concentrate more on creating a large pool of different products/services from various countries, platforms to get consolidated at one place.

The main target of such companies is to attract as many customers from all over the world to increase their business reach and profit margin by creating bulk of sales. Like, in case of Netflix, they believe to promote less popular movies/series with a much lower maintenance cost to greater number of customer segments attracting greater diversified cultural groups.

Today, Netflix is one of the leading video based platforms providing greater number of varied options to all of its niche subscribers making it profitable on digital platform. Its tail is too long and will definitely be more diversified as compared to traditional video stores. We can surely measure its tail by estimated subscribers(9.6 million) in first quarter of 2019 from various countries.