How "long tail business" works in China

  When I talked about the Crazy English echo magazine in the previous post, I wondered why Hong Kong cannot have a fantastic magazine like this. I at first worried Hong Kong of losing her competitiveness. Finally I think the long tail business model cannot be applied in Hong Kong was the main cause.

   Long tail business was a business model explored by a gigantic online book store, Amazon.com. Selling best-seller books is the main source of income for a conventional bookstore. While for amazon.com, she also sell unpopular books which are expected to be interested by a very small amount of readers. Amazon.com managed to venture on this area because she are not bother of the expensive lease in shopping mall where every small piece of area is too precious for displaying unpopular books. Did Amazon failed in this attempt? No! She discovered an entire new blue sea! When an online store facing billions of customers, an unpopular book which only draws interest from 0.0001% customers can result in big revenue. What's about thousands of unpopular books? They were summoned to huge revenue!


  Let go back to the story of China. There are many magazines with specific topics such as, military, travel, computer programming, foreign languages, history, literature, short tales, etc. Some topics are even very strange. As China has a huge population based of around 1.3billions, 0.0001% of readers were enough for the publishers to thrive.  Therefore, magazines like Crazy English echo can enjoy an adequate amount of target customers.

  What's about Hong Kong? Hong Kong is a small marketplace with tiny customer based of around 7millions. Magazines in Hong Kong are mostly digging news from hot topics like eating, drinking, local news or "nosy news" from TV stars. That's why there are so many "nosy magazine" in favour of the majority. Are Hong Kong people so superficial and naive to digest something intellectual? Actually, crowd, no matter from HK, China or America, is mainly mediocre, foolish and not intelligent. While a big country,especially a country willing to embrace the whole world, elites then can find the position they strive for. Therefore, as a Hongkonger living in a tiny space with small population based, we should be aware not to satisfy from the local newspaper,magazine, TV shows that are prepared for the mediocre crowd.They sometimes even pretended to be sophisticated! Instead, we should open our mind to embrace information come from all over the world.