Risk factors of the long tail in mobile manga sales

Abstract

After the Long Tail was proposed by Chris Anderson in 2004, people started believing his theory that internet services, such as Amazon.com, can achieve great success in retailing. Internet stores can sell enormous numbers of books, comics, CDs, and DVDs and make great profits through the reduction in distribution costs that is achieved through this medium. Despite the fact that mobile internet retail is on equal terms with retail through PCs, the properties and modes of usage of a mobile phone, which strongly influence the purchasing aspect, have not been considered as the Long Tail of mobile retail. In this paper, therefore, we have discussed whether the Long Tail of mobile internet retail is profitable, especially in connection with mobile manga sales. Three series of researches were conducted in this study: a Pareto analysis for mobile manga sales, two focus group and individual interviews on how to use and purchase mobile manga, and a field experiment to determine the influence of distributors' recommender systems. The results we found were that when users searched for novel titles, they did not devote sufficient time toward retrieving the same and mostly depended on best seller rankings. We thus concluded that the Long Tail of mobile manga sales has few prospects of profitability.