Long Tail of Software Publishing

I think its very important for ever business person, regardless of role and scope, to constantly educate themselves on the changing business environment. My personal favorite is web 2.0 concepts. The long tail idea is one of those concepts that galvanizes some of the main concepts of web 2.0.

Long tail has several key points of relevance in business but within the publishing world, it provides some unique opportunities to delve into how a publisher can create incremental value by not concentrating on the core users or functionality of their product.



So how can you capitalize on this concept? It starts with taking a close look at how your product is used by your customers. Take the graph above and tailor it to your own business. What are the core functional interactions (TBYB, purchase etc) and what happens after these interactions are completed? What further interactions can you leverage to create more value for your customer and yourself? Even if the purchase might be the most important part of the interaction, it’s the everything else that happens after the purchase that is important to the user. The interaction should not end with the transaction, but in fact it should be the start of a long-term relationship that allows for multiple revenue generating interactions.

Ultimately, you goal is to crate more opportunities with your customer and the long tail gives you a starting point to understanding these opportunities. Here is a great blog from Joe Kraus on software and Longtail.

- chris

Figuring out how to deliver your software to the world has to be one of the simplest choices you have to make as an independent software publisher. I say its easy because you really want to get your titles into as many channels as possible, with the least amount of fuss.

The SIIA did some research and found that more that three-quarters of the publishers they surveyed see the creation of new distributions channels as their main method of future growth.

How do you identify those top channels or, even better, how do you identify the new channels. Are there new channels for promoting your ESD titles these days?

These are tougher questions to answer and I'd be interested in hearing your feedback. But until then here are my suggestions:

1. Challenge your existing channels to meet their quotas and beyond. ParetoLogic recently challenged their affiliates to outsell ParetoLogic's top affiliate with the winner driving away a Harley Davidson motor bike. Will this work? I'm not sure but it will definitely capture the interest and imagination of their partners.
2. Get back to basics and identify how your customer finds your product. Create relationships with organizations that can support this discovery behavior by either sharing the revenue or allowing for upsells. Does your product have complimentary hardware? The best example of this was my former employer, ACD Systems bundling their photo management software with Pentax cameras.

Please provide your thoughts on this challenge as I'm very interested in learning about your collective experience.

- chris