The long tail was popularized by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 Wired magazine article in which he mentioned Amazon.com, Apple and Yahoo! as examples of businesses applying this strategy. Anderson elaborated the concept in his book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More.

Anderson argued that products that are in low demand or have low sales volume cancollectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters, but only if the store or distribution channel is large enough.

The tail of a distribution represents a period in time when sales for less common products return a profit due to reduced marketing and distribution costs. Long tail is when sales are made for goods not commonly sold. These goods can return a profit through reduced marketing and distribution costs.

According to Anderson, “What people intuitively grasped was that new efficiencies in distribution, manufacturing, and marketing were changing the definition of what was commercially viable across the board. The best way to describe these forces is that they are turning unprofitable customers, products, and markets into profitable ones.” Therefore, the story of the Long Tail is really about the economics of abundance: “what happens when the bottlenecks that stand between supply and demand in our culture start to disappear and everything becomes available to everyone.”

The Long Tail is an extremely important concept and has great relevance for online businesses . I am attaching, for your perusal, the link to Anderson’s path breaking Wired article. If you like it, you may want to buy the book.

Read the article here

Visual courtesy : https://www.flickr.com/photos/zacharyparadis/