I knew I had to read this book due to the number of references to The Long Tail all over the internet. Bloggers refer to this principle as if it’s common knowledge, well it should be for all marketers.
The yellow is The Long Tail, which continues on far beyond the confines of this page.
The idea of The Long Tail came from Chris Anderson in a 2004 Wired Magazine article. Anderson is the editor in chief at Wired and former business editor at The Economist. The idea of The Long Tail is that because of the internet there is a huge business of selling niche products that traditionally were ignored because of shelf space costs. Anderson argues that products with only a handful of buyers when all pooled together can rival the biggest sellers if there is a channel of distribution large enough. Companies such as Amazon and Itunes have made a large amount of money on this principle. Because these companies have virtually no shelf space costs they can afford to carry books or cds that only sell a few copies a year, whereas Barnes and Nobles or Sam Goody simply can’t afford to carry them.
This may seem like it does not have a ton to do with advertising and marketing, but it does. It gives great incite into the minds of consumer’s and how we are changing our buying behavior because virtually anything we can think of, we can now easily purchase.
In the newest version of this book, Anderson added on a chapter: The Long Tail of Marketing. This is a really insightful chapter less on The Long Tail, but more about how companies need to change their advertising model from the mass media TV/Newspaper stance to a new model that revolves around customer interaction and content creation.
Given the popularity of Anderson’s concept of The Long Tail, he started a blog with the same name.
Posted by hobokin 
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