What is the Long Tail?

According to Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired magazine, the Long tail is a part of the business market such as Amazon or Netflix, that sell multiple products each in small quantities. It is the set of catalog products (books, CDs, DVDs ...) which are sold in small proportion, but the sum of sales could exceed the collectively sale of the most popular products.

Chris Anderson noted that a relatively small number of weblogs have many web links pointing to them, then that the long tail composed of millions of weblogs have few links pointing to them. In a series of conferences in the Wired magazine, published in October 2004, Anderson described the effects of this long tail on the present and future business models. He believes that products that are subject to low demand or have low sales volume can collectively represent a market share equal to or greater than that of bestsellers, if distribution channels may offer enough choices and create the link to discover them. Examples of such channels can be caught in Amazon.com, Netfix, Rezolibre.com or Wikipedia. As these examples illustrate, the long tail is a potential market, made available by the possibilities of the Internet .

The Long Tail is particularly suitable for Web distribution model because the cost of putting in an additional product line is marginal and displays virtual e-commerce sites are virtually infinite, unlike physical stores. The Long Tail applies perfectly to cultural distance.

Direct consequence: The Long Tail promotes the emergence of niche markets where niche products will be offered for sale and ultimately very likely find a buyer.