Long Tail Evidence

The 'Long Tail' is a popular term these days. It is the idea that the aggregate of all the little niche markets is bigger than the mainstream markets. The total number of book sales for obscure books (less than 1,000 copies) is greater than the sales of the top ten list of books that sell over a million copies.

The internet and the power of search mean that we are now opening up all of these small, obscure niche markets. Buyers and sellers can now find each other. For example, today you can have an active market for salt shakers on Ebay that was not possible before.

The market for information is no less affected. Look at this example of news media. Not only are niche web publishers creating new content, they are also taking market share from the big players. Here we see a chart that displays the percent of total page views for a selection of information sources. You can see that Wikipedia and Blogger which are published by many individuals have grown exponentially in popularity. At the same time the commercial news media - published by editors - has been loosing market share since 2006.

Factoid: The term "Long Tail' was coined by Chris Anderson who is the editor of WIRED magazine. He now has a book called "The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More"