Ghostsigns and the long tail…

I’ve been doing a bit of work on the archive and recording the number of photos contributed by each photographer involved.  (These are from of an edited set of about 1,500 selected from the c.2,500 so far in the Flickr group.) The graph above plots each photographer along the bottom and the number of photos from that photographer above this.

Of 350 photographers with images in this edited set:

• 9 have 20+ photos
• 25 have 10 or more
• 191 have just a single image

This is evidence of the long tail as described by Chris Anderson (see the start of the video below for another example).

What is noteworthy is that without the 191 people contributing their single images the eventual archive will be much less valuable. Many of these are unique images with no other photographers having pictures of the same sign. This is really powerful in the context of this project and shows what is possible through the mechanism employed to get the archive established using Flickr.

Thank you again to everyone involved, we are about to move into phase 2 which will involve more formally committing images to The History of Advertising Trust Ghostsigns Archive.