Digital queuing

An interesting corollary of some of the effects David Maister notes on queuing (thanks to T for the link) - which are brilliantly insightful - is that it is possible to make money out of queuing in situations where people find it annoying. High-volume download sites, such as video games and online video, now make a living out of providing a free service with an inbuilt queuing system. You are given your number in the queue, and told how long it may take before you make your way to the front of the queue. These numbers are updated as you go. During this queuing period, there are usually ads to endure, the chief of which is normally a subscription to the provider's queue-less system where you get instant (and higher-speed) access to the files you wish to download. These providers have many competitors, and information about the competitors is easy to access.

Whether these providers have a long term future, as bandwidth gets cheaper, I don't know, but I think the data from these providers would make an interesting subject for analysis. What is the optimal point in the waiting period to sell someone a higher place in the queue. How long does the queue have to be before people jump ship?

Of course impulse buying in queues has a long history - supermarkets, and now particularly the UK Post Office, which has a cunning strategy of using a maze queue to sell kid and youth-focused cheap tat, in a line that by its nature is going to be full of kids and young people with money (but I think they miss a trick by not selling to the old people in their queues!)

But I'm not sure how many queues have previously offered the chance to buy out of the queue, or a higher place in the queue, at the point of queuing.