The Long Tail

Thought some of you might be interested in this. In my work I'm more or less plugged into these streams but I forget sometimes that terms and phenomenon on the net that are old news now, like the "long tail", haven't really filtered their way out to some of the people who may be most inspired by it.

Rather than re-inventing the description of this, I'm going to be lazy and cut and paste a good summary. If you are thinking about any kind of niche market, like Westies perchance, or leveraging some obscure interest of yours into something you can do full time, this stuff may be exciting.

"Our world is being transformed by the Internet and the near limitless choice that it provides to consumers; tomorrow's markets belong to those who can take advantage of this. The Long Tail is really about the economics of abundance, an entirely new model for business that is just starting to show its power as unlimited selection reveals new truths about what consumers want and how they want to get it. The record business has been transformed by iTunes and Rhapsody; a similar transformation is coming to just about every industry imaginable.

What happens when everything in the world becomes available to everyone? When the combined value of all the millions of items that may sell only a few copies equals or exceeds the value of the few items that sell millions each? When a bunch of kids with no profit motive can record a song or make a video and get the same electronic distribution for it as the most powerful corporation?"

This concept first surfaced "officially" as a very interesting article back in October of 2004. Chris has since written a book on it that just came out, exploring more in depth, where he shows:

"...how the Internet has made possible a new world in which the combined value of modest sellers and quirky titles equals the sales of the top hits. He coined the term "The Long Tail" to describe this phenomenon, a phrase that's since appeared in boardrooms and media around the world. "In short, though we still obsess over hits," Anderson writes, "they are not quite the economic force they once were. Where are those fickle consumers going instead? No single place. They are scattered to the winds as markets fragment into a thousand niches."

Be careful if you decide to research this though, there is a big niche market on niche marketing information which has hit a tipping point where, when you have enough people competing for the same niche market, other dynamics start playing a factor, like technologies out there which act as "consensual filters" to sort the wheat from the chaffe. See one of my side links on Consensual Web Filters for more info on these if you're interested.