I should start speaking more of the utterly interesting Long Tail phenomenon, a concept invented by Chris Anderson. What is the Long Tail? Briefly speaking, the Internet allows for more products to be sold than in the offline world. In other words, if brick and mortar shop inventories are limited in size and sourcing capacities, the Internet empowers anyone to put her/his personal (artistic or not) stuff for sale. Etailers like eBay or Amazon aren’t constrained in any way and all the products in the world, provided the right product categories exist, would fit in their virtual stores. Hence the fact that thanks to the e-Commerce revolution, the consumer world, which was a world of ‘hits’ or best sellers, became a world in which end consumers rather than distributors select the products that are worth selling.

Well, I’ve been wanting bad to blog about my great friend and HEC Paris fellow Emmanuel Perez-Duarte’s pictures but didn’t know how to link it with technology. I believe Emmanuel’s Flickr presence is the perfect example of Long Tail business.

Some factual background first: Emmanuel is an amazing photograph (patient, organized, careful about details) and a true geek when it comes to photo retouching (Emmanuel uses mathematical modeling and open source software Gimp to do so). His photography and retouching skills are sort of challenged everyday by one of his brothers, a photographer and active member of the Flickr community as well. A while ago (a year and half maybe? Manu, could you confirm this? allright, 8 months), Emmanuel had started to use Flickr as a storage and sharing Internet service – probably not even thinking of becoming rather quickly one of the most admired community contributors of this excellent Web 2.0 company now belonging to Yahoo!. In fact, Emmanuel not only met people who helped him enhance his skills (he is the inventor of a new set of spherical retouching techniques), he also made money thanks to Flickr as several editors get in touch with him every week to purchase the rights of one or many of his pictures. Last name I can think of: The Lonely Planet! Hard to come up with a more prestigious reference, isn’t it?

All in all, Emmanuel’s story is the perfect Long Tail concept illustration. Emmanuel is a French Mexican business management and economics-trained graduate student, taking pictures and doing photo retouching as a hobby. Had the Internet not existed yet, Emmanuel would’ve probably done like we all used to do before the age of e-Commerce: store his pictures in huge albums, put it in a cupboard, and forget it until the next time he moves to another flat.

Now that virtual communities exist easing gatherings of people with similar interests, Emmanuel has – not even on purpose – found a distribution canal for his brilliant work. It would’ve been a shame hadn’t his talent been brought to light and his pictures remained stored in shoe boxes. Selling pictures is definitely not a self sufficient job, but at least one may reap the benefits of the time invested in one’s passions and meet people who are to help you fine tune your technique and style.

Click here to access Emmanuel’s pictures on Flickr. Enjoy!

What other Long Tail example can you think of?

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