The rise of the long tailed beast
Mar. 9, 2021
Some time ago I watched a pretty cool video about "long tail websites". A long tail website aims to attract visitors through its sheer number of pages and visitors can be monetized through ads. Of course, and as always, marketing and SEO are key. An example of a successful long tail site could be a thesaurus website listing hundreds of thousands of pages for different words. Much of the site content could consist of data scrapped (ex. sample sentences from children's books), which is exactly what the video creator claims to have done. In essence, this is a way to monetize data. The main challenge here is figuring out how to collect, analyze and present big data in an interesting way.Having just moved on from Tomati that had hundreds of thousands of restaurant inspection data I got this idea 🤔... and that's how https://score.restaurant/ was born. Will it succeed? Will it get visitors? I don't know, but I want to give it one more shot. At the very least it was a worthwhile experience to get a blueprint to quickly (and freely) create and deploy sophisticated web applications. In my next blog post I'll detail exactly how I did it.