The long tail concept

I think that today more and more people are able to buy on Internet. The long tail is a powerful new force for our economy: the rise of a niche. Fist of all I would like to give a definition of long tail. According to Chris Anderson, the theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits" (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.

One example of this is the theory's prediction that demands for products not available in traditional bricks and mortar stores is potentially as big as for those that are. But the same is true for video not available on broadcast TV on any given day, and songs not played on radio.

Everybody knows the economic effects of web retailing: economy on stocks, personnel, great option to monitor all sorts of marketing information, quickly adapt offers to demands; that make it a little bit similar to industrial “just-in-time” techniques - to minimize the expenses of all points of a distribution chain. Customers have immediate access to the whole shop database; they can find much more items with several clicks than while spending hours between bookstore shells.
The immediate great advantage of web retailing is interactiveness. The process of buying and selling becomes an exchange platform as for customers, as well for suppliers and aggregators: exchange of the opinions, products or affiliates services.

To conclude we could say that long tail is really adapted to e-business. Even if it is a new concept I am pretty sure that it will go further because there is still a huge potential in the cultural industry and as an e-business model, long tail seems to be adequate to change the mass consumption strategy.

Useful links to go further in with the long tail comprehension:

http://www.journaldunet.com/0703/070326-net-long-tail-definition-solution-outils-longue-traine.shtml

http://longtail.typepad.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Tail