A Long Tail epitome: Emmanuel Perez-Duarte's pictures on Flickr
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 m
athematical 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?
Related posts:
- Welcome to Tech IT Easy new blogger Emmanuel Perez-Duarte
- Catching up on software and entrepreneurship books
- Best Newsletters
- Minutes of the IE-Club lecture at Microsoft France on European Rising Stars of the Internet
- Entrepreneurial brainstorming session #15: an online payment feature for bloggers (eCommerce)
Amazon, Business strategy, Economics, Education, Entertainment, Europe, Friends, Globalization, Internet, Networks, Silicon Valley, Storage, USA, eBay, innovation, marketing, open-source, retail, user-generated content
What other Long Tail examples can you think of?
That’s the best question you can think about if you want to be the future world famous E-Entrepreneur.
All the big successes of the last years (Napster, Youtube, MySpace, FlickR, etc.) are based on the phenomenon you describe: Enabling people to share what they love most for free (i.e. books, music, photos and videos).
As you explain in your post, the reason of this success is simple. The break-even point of each product is much lower than beore, as the variable cost of offering products on the web is extremely low.
To use your example on Manu, even if his cost might be rather high for a hobby photograph (as he spends a lot of time working on his pictures), passion and reconnaissance from his readers seem to create enough value to make him continue(…same for you, Jeremy?!?).
This new way of distribution can entirely change an industry in a few years, but as industrial lobbies are often very powerful the transition to a new business model can be very slow.
I believe that in a rather close future, other products can be selled through the web and, thus, companies can profit from the ‘long tail’. For instance, why couldn’t we sell new cars through the Internet?
Well, I must say I’m flattered! Thank you Jeremy for such a kind post. However I’d like add a few corrections:
- I using Flickr as a storage service in July 2006, but started really using all functionalities since October 2006 (when I got a pro account), so it has been rather quick.
- I am definitely not the inventor of spherical panoramas, I learned the techniques from various sources, the principal being my brother.
- I could say I am a bit popular on Flickr, but maybe “one of the most admired” is a little far-fetched. Since October, the front page of my photostream has been visited 20,000 times, which is a bit less than the couple millions that Flickr user _rebekka has achieved (true, I am not a blonde icelandic woman with nice legs :p, and she is considered to be Flickr’s most popular photographer). Her story, however, is a perfect example of the long tail phenomenon: she too has started it out as a hobby, got popular, appeared on the Icelandic news channel, made the ad campaign for a car company, etc. She eventually went back to university to study visual arts. And there are many users who, like her, like me, have been contacted by advertising agencies, art magazines or art galleries (I am still missing the latter:p)
- One issue that is worth mentioning is that of property rights. It is true that i have sold some pictures, but I suspect many have been used without my consent: Flickr’s download “protection” practically doesn’t exist, if you want to sell your pictures, you are compelled to upload a small version of your pictures -which I don’t do, because, well, I’m not a professional and don’t intend to be, and i want my friends to be able to view my pictures as they wish. And i think many, many, many people on the net are in that position: they do stuff that could potentially be sold, put it on the net, but then it gets “stolen” because they are not really aware of the commercial value of what they do.
- Which brings me to my other comment: it’s not all about money.
The Flickr community (and similar communities on the web, often related -understandably- to the open source world), is what could be the closest mankind has ever come to a communist utopia, where people exchange ideas at no cost, give away what they find, help each other out, everybody’s a friend to everybody, etc. This is of course a caricature, but that’s the spirit, and I think that’s the bottom line of Flickr’s strategy and principal reason for its commercial success.
Again, thanks for your post Jeremy, see you soon!
(please read “Flickr’s brand strategy” instead of “Flickr’s strategy)
[...] Check his works of Art here. Faithful readers of Tech IT Easy had already read about Emmanuel here in a post dedicated to the e-commerce long [...]