Chapter 15 The "short head" that cannot be ignored

In the new office near the 798 factory in Beijing, Yang Bo is working with the development team to improve Douban's ranking function.In the past, Douban had a leaderboard in each of its reading, movie, and music columns, but there was no corresponding setting on the home page. "What we need to solve now is the problem of 'how to start' for new visitors." After fully exploring the potential of the niche market, this "Web2. "The head of the curve, re-planning its own site. how to startMost of the time, this problem doesn't seem like a problem.Every website has a homepage, doesn't it?You see, Google only has an input box and a search button, but it still gets such a huge amount of traffic, why worry about users having nowhere to start?In fact, search is for users who already have a clear idea in mind.The truth is, we often begin our journey of discovery when our minds are blank.

Chris?Anderson mentioned in the book "The Long Tail": "If you only have those (best-selling) products that are gathered at the head, you will quickly find that customers need more things that you can't provide. If you only have those ambush In the long tail (niche) products, you will find that customers don't know where to start." If customers come to the store and are presented with unpopular products that they have never heard of, then they can only find nowhere to go. Then turn around and leave.Although the potential of the long-tail market is gradually emerging, users who are accustomed to "one-stop" services still need service providers who can "take care of both ends".

In the process of constant discussions with netizens on the blog, Chris?Anderson acknowledges that the niche market is largely taken over by junk.But this is not a big problem. The important thing is that there needs to be a mechanism to separate the essence from the dross, so that they can be discovered by the real Bole.For this reason, the "long tail" needs popular products on the "short head" as the starting point of the recommendation mechanism, and various filtering systems can lead consumers to find the next product through one product. Once mp3.com became the most outstanding "headless" failure case. In 1997, Mike ?Robertson launched this seemingly classic long-tail business model, which allows everyone to upload the music they make, and this service also allows artists to bypass record labels and directly connect with listeners.At that time, entrepreneurs had optimistically predicted that those artists would pay fees to the website to promote music, and record labels would be completely destroyed because of this new platform, and fresh and pleasant music flowers would bloom everywhere from then on.

How many people remember what mp3.com was like before the first NASDAQ crash?Its final impression in the public mind is this: countless unpleasant noises spread all over the site, and a business that seemed to change the world ended up dismal.The root of the problem is that it has not obtained authorization from those big labels to place some popular works on the website-the audience cannot find a familiar entry point, let alone a deeper and wider exploration afterwards.Everyone could see this situation at the time, but no one ever took it as a problem.Facts have proved that focusing only on the "long tail" without seeing the "short head" is equally ineffective.

One day at the end of October, the words "Most Concerned by Douban Members (Douban Ranking)" appeared on the homepage of Douban.com.Yang Bo said that this is a new feature that has just been launched: "We have integrated the rankings of books, movies, and music and put them on the homepage. Many people came to Douban for the first time and saw it on the rankings. If you are familiar with the things, you will naturally stop and explore the things you are interested in.” Of course, after the old users log in, this ranking will no longer appear on the home page.For them, the starting point of every discovery journey will be the books, records and movies presented on the personal home page according to the different tastes of each user.