Alex Iskold in his post “Long Tail of the Blogosphere” makes an insightful comment that “You can make money on the long tail but not in the long tail” that I touched on in my previous post on “Publisher-Centric Content Sharing”.

For those unfamiliar with the term, “long tail” has become an increasingly popular, especially in the Blogosphere! The idea behind the long tail is actually a simple one. The phrase was originally coined by Wired’s Chris Anderson in 2004 as a statistics concept used to refer to the idea that collectively, things that are in rather low demand can amount to quite large volumes.

Squidoo describes it in the following way:

The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of “hits” (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail.

In the content publishing world, the long tails represents the aggregate of all the small or “niche” content publishers and bloggers.  If if this chart represents the distribution of content publisher traffic, there green area (“Head”) represents the aggregate “bulk” of high volue traffic to a small handful of popular sites, while the yellow area represents the Long Tail shared accross a large number of smaller publishers. Those interested in more information on the long tail should check out Chris Anderson’s Long Tail 101.

As I mentioned in my previous post, Grouptivity is about helping monetize the long tail. For smaller content publishers, we do that in three different ways:

• We expose and promote your content to generate extra traffic
  By allowing users to share content on publisher’s sites and then exposing that “user-generated” content to the community at large, Grouptivity sends traffic back to publisher’s sites.
  


• We build a community around content to increase page views
  By building a discussion community around the content your readers have shared, Grouptivity increases the number of page views and then shares the resulting ad revenue with the publisher.
  


• We increase the “viral” spread of publisher’s content
  By providing a robust set of sharing and rating tools (including browser add-ons, blogging plug-ins and widgets), Grouptivity accelerates sharing of content via email, social bookmarking and other forms of syndication (RSS, i.e.).

Given the revenue generating challenges facing publishers in the long tail, we feel a multiple prong strategy to traffic and revenue generation is the best one. I will share the highlights from our upcoming presentation at the AlwaysOn Venture Summit West event in future posts for those interested in long trail revenue generating strategies.