At 8 am this morning I fired up the laptop to watch the impressive US showing in the men’s 4 x 100 freestyle relay. The video quality and the player were both very impressive, and I didn’t really even mind downloading the SilverLight player to make the whole thing work. As I was surfing around the site, I started watching the preliminaries of women’s badminton. I am not per se a Badminton fan; I was just trying to get a sense of the content depth NBC was posting.

This is where a thought occurred to me, we spend a lot of time in this industry talking about The Long-Tail of Media. I even hosted a panel on the subject last week at Ad-Tech in Chicago. What we don’t normally think about though is that large Web sites have their own internal long tail. They have deep, highly niche content that is rarely viewed. When this content is viewed, however, it tends to be by highly engaged users.

Therefore, do large Web publishers have the same problem as small ones - the ability to monetize small trafficked content? Not really - they can sell the inventory as ROS or even to an ad network or some other type of remnant inventory clearance. But this inventory does tend to be valued much lower that other, more prominent sections. It seems to me, that these sites could do a better job here. They just have to find the niche that pulls these low traffic sections together and sell it appropriately.

Here at Nielsen Online, I’ve been working on a technique to do just this. Using SiteCensus Demographics we can optimize large publisher long-tail URLs into targeted ad products. It’s pretty neat, and it seems to be working well so far.

Tags: long tail, nbc, olympics