In digital marketing, the emphasis for a long time strategy now has been on quality, rather than quantity. However, since information technology provides new ways of providing content, it becomes easier and cheaper to focus on quantity and to provide more content. Therefore, the future of content might be focusing on more content.

This will not be the case because it has worked for a couple of famous sites just as The Post, but also because content will take a wider range of forms, as for instance: High volume content strategies, automated content, short form content and video content. As a result, the accessibility of publishing tools will also improve, making it easier to create and publish content.

To elaborate more on high volume content strategies, this success relies on the long tail theory. This originated in e-commerce and is the theory that collectively, the demand for a large number of niche products, can exceed the collective demand for a small number of popular or bestselling products. Using the long tail theory, The Post (for instance) is creating thousands of niche articles, which each attract modest traffic, rather creating fewer, big content articles, as collectively the niche articles deliver more traffic overall.

Furthermore, the cost of content production is falling because of the approved internet technology, even as distribution cost are very low, enabling more content to be produced. At the moment we are seeing a high volume approach being taken by many established B2B sites and influencers. Tools are also constantly developing, which will help many people mote to producing higher volumes of content.

Do you think there is still a future for content quantity? Or do you think the volume of content will be lower in the end? Will the long tail theory still be an essential part of the future of content?

Technological utopians have been predicting for years that the internet will weaken the dominance of superstar artists in the music industry and enrich the teeming masses of smaller, niche creators. But new research suggests that this ‘long tail’ theory is wrong: superstars are capturing the vast majority of music revenues and their share is increasing because of the rise of digital services like iTunes and Spotify.

What is interesting is that a relatively niche group of engaged music listeners have most interest in discovering as diverse a range of music as possible. Most mainstream consumers want leading by the hand to the very top slither of music catalogue. This is why radio has held its own for so long and why curated and programmed music services are so important for engaging the masses with digital.

It is right that the falling cost of distribution has made more music available to consumers than ever before: most digital music services have catalogues of more than 20m tracks. However most of those tracks go unheard. The ‘long tail’ is very thin and anemic compared to the ‘fad head’.

Using data compiled from record labels, distributors, artists, managers and music services, they found that the ‘superstar economy’ is even more extreme in digital services than it is in physical stores. This is partly down to the nature of digital devices, as a digital store or service has a home page that often has to squeeze onto a few square inches of smartphone screen while a high street store has dozens of square feet of window space.

What do you think about the long tail theory in the music industry? Will new ways of sharing and discovering music online could yet inject more life into the ‘long tail’ or will most consumers stick to the mainstream and is music going to remain a superstar economy?