What is a long tail?

"The Long Tail" (proper known with the main letters) is the concept created by Chris Anderson, editor -in -chief of the magazine Wired , in October 2004. This differs from bricks and mortar in the past that offered fewer products that were more popular. His argument is that with the development of the market, it tends to develop overall and more towards specialized products. The way it looks like a graph comparing popularity and the amount of product sold was called "Long Tail". The concept of a long tail can also be applied to free goods, such as blogs, where several thousand receive most of the incoming links and traffic and there are millions with several more. Since its proposal, the concept of Dlouhá Tail has proved fertile for application, research and experimentation. Is known in online business and mass media, but also used in connection withUser -based innovations, microfinance, social networking mechanisms, economic models and marketing.

Chris Anderson was partially inspired to propose the concept of a long tail by reading an essay from the 2003 Clay Shirky called "Power Laws, Weblogs and Inequality". His primary work is that a long tail tail can exceed the volume of its basic products if the distribution channel is large enough. This preferably benefits online businesses such as Amazon, which tends to have larger selections, above the retailers of brick and mortar like Wal-Mart.

The long tail is somewhat contrary to the parent principle that claims that 80% of the effects in any given situation come from 20% of potential causes. In markets that benefit from log tail, more than 50% of profit can come from 90% of products that are least popular but together have a large volume.