Last week, I speculated about the long tail of S60 applications.

But let’s not get too excited: it seems that the long tail is not good for everyone.

The long tail phenomenon is extremely important for aggregators such as Handango, My-Symbian, Nokia Content Discoverer, iTunes, Amazon.com, or eBay. They can make a load of money from the long tail, if they implement it right.

Also, the phenomenon is good for the end-users. They’ll find more and better stuff related to the weird little things they care about.

But if you are an application developer, you can’t make much money in the long tail, unless you are in a lucrative niche with a high price tag (see for example Digia ImageExpo)

So watch out the “pile of bodies” section, my friend, it could be a scary place.

On October 2004, Chris Anderson - the Chief Editor of Wired Magazine - wrote his famous article The Long Tail, in which he urged people to forget the megahits, and to focus on “the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream”. The article was clearly a homerun: it first sparked the Long Tail blog, a speech-tour for Chris Anderson (I heard him speak at Nokia house in Jan 2005), and eventually a bestseller book (today selling in Amazon.com with Sales Rank #11).

But wait… What on earth has this to do with S60 applications?

Probably a great deal. But since I wasn’t sure, I decided to do some research. According to this page, people have downloaded 26.1 million S60 applications through My-Symbian.com. Of these 26.1 million downloads, the top-10 most popular applications accounted for 4 million = 15%.

Interesting… It seems that 85% of My-Symbian.com downloads comes from the long tail (= outside top-10).

Since I don’t have any better download/sales figures about S60 applications, I can’t investigate any further. But here is a question for My-Symbian, All About Symbian, Handango, SymbianOne, SymbianGear, and others: what proportion of your S60 application downloads/sales comes from the “long tail”? Let’s define the “long tail” here as the applications not in the top-20. I fully understand if you don’t want to share the download statistics, but I’m sure many people in the S60 ecosystem would appreciate the info.

I believe “the long tail of S60 applications” is a timely topic worth thinking about, especially as Flash Lite based mini games and other kinds of “mobile snacks” are starting to pop up with increasing pace.

What do you think? Is the “long tail of S60 applications” mode viable? How could we make the life easier for the “long tail” developers?

(big thanks for Oren for the idea behind this blog post)