HitTail - Long Tail Keyword Marketing Tool. Rebuilding Media: The fate of media. The Long Tail. One of the best economics papers on Amazon. The Long Tail: A methodology for estimating Amazon's Long Tail sales. [Update: I've posted additional analysis from the MIT team here] One of the most quoted statistics in my original article was the data point that 57% of Amazon’s book sales are in the Long Tail, defined as beyond the 100,000 books available in the typical Barnes and Noble superstore (we sometimes used 130,000, which is the inventory of its larger stores).
We arrived at that number by working with the team at the MIT Sloan School that had produced one of the best economics papers on Amazon to date. Because Amazon, as a public company closely scrutinized by analysts looking for any hint of a forward-looking statement, does not reveal its sales figures, the MIT team had to attempt to reverse-engineer them from the information Amazon does provide, chiefly sales rank of individual titles.