The fallacy of the long tail, and the super six
According to sources referenced by Mashable, there are over 350 million registered domains and over 1 trillion pages indexed by Google. A search term we optimize for at Infochimps “twitter data” yields over 1 billion hits. That’s a looooong tail.
I keep 6 tabs open in my browser: Gmail (Infochimps and personal), Gcal, Greader, Facebook, and as of recently, Turntable.fm. I monitor my Twitter feed using their native Mac app. I pull up Google or Quora when I need an answer to a question. In a generic sense, these tabs represent what I call the super six: email, calendar, RSS, social, music and search.
This post was inspired by an AdWeek article (full article in print) I read today at Farley’s. The gist of the article is that appx $20 billion is currently being spent on display ads, and industry execs expect that market to grow 10X over the next 5 years to $200 billion. That’s a lot of growth and a lot of ads. While there are over a trillion pages those ads could be displayed on, the best real estate is on the super six.
With Google+, Google now has leading offerings in five of the super six, the only hole being in music. Google quietly launched Google Music, which is in beta, earlier this Spring to little fanfare. Pandora, Turntable.fm and Spotify should keep “tabs” on this project, because I anticipate it will become core to Google’s offering. If Google Music becomes a mainstay in my browser, Google will own all of the ad impressions served to me. That’s a good thing if the ad market indeed becomes $200 billion.
What other tabs do you keep open? I am particularly interested in what tabs people keep open outside of Google properties.
