The Long Tail
This term and concept is swarming the web, so I thought I’d take a moment to mention where it comes from and what it means.
I’ll let the new wikipedia entry explain:
The Long Tail is an economic term that describes how products that are in low demand or have low sales volume collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters. Further, the term is used to describe the effects of the long tail in creating demand for obscure items and how case examples such as Amazon.com, NetFlix and Wikipedia are successfully tapping in to the long tail market potentials through the utilization of distribution and sales channels on the Internet.
Description
A former Amazon employee described the long tail as: “We sold more books today that didn’t sell at all yesterday than we sold today of all the books that did sell yesterday.” In the same sense Wikipedia has many low popularity articles that, collectively, create a higher quantity of demand than a limited number of mainstream articles found on a professional site such as Britannica.
The term is derived from the XY graph that is created when charting popularity to inventory. For example in the graph shown on this page, the total inventory of Wikipedia articles is along the bottom line, while the popularity rating (web page hit statistics) is along the up and down axis. So for example the Wikipedia homepage would receive the most views and be on the far left in the red, while this page might be on the far right in the yellow, as would most of Wikipedias articles. The same could be said for Amazons book inventory or NetFlix’s movie inventory. The total volume of low popularity items exceeds the volume of high popularity items.
The term comes from an Oct 04 Wired article by Chris Anderson. He has since started a great blog with a wealth of info.