‘An embarrassment of niches’
IDEA No 73
THE LONG TAIL
The long tail is what happens when everything is available to everyone. Given enough choice and enough customers, obscure products tailored to our individual needs are more desirable than mass-market blockbusters.
In statistics, the long tail refers to distributions with a large number of occurrences far from the head of the spread. They arise when a large proportion of data points are unusually far from the mean.
The term has gained popularity in recent times as a description of the online retailing strategy of selling small quantities of lots of unique items.
The concept was popularized by ...
Get 100 Ideas that Changed the Web now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
