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The Long Tail is a new book by Wired Editor Chris Anderson that outlines the term he himself coined that describes how the combined sales of niche items equals that of the top big selling items. Using examples like iTunes, Netflix and Amazon he shows how the internet has enabled consumers to be able to find the most obscure items they can dream of and it opens up a whole new revenue stream for online retailers that are not held back by limited shelf-space. The term "long tail" refers to the graph that is created when tracking the sales of these items. The further down the chart you go, into the lower selling items, you get an extending tail that in many cases never actually drop down to zero.

Being someone that spends most of my day either surfing the web or working to help businesses perform in the online space most of what Anderson discusses is not new to me but it still gets me thinking about just how drastically the internet has reshaped every single business out there. It's something we take for granted now but it is quite amazing the transformation that has occured over the past decade.

Posted at September 15, 2006 02:52 PM