The long tail concept
In October 2004, Chris Anderson published his now famous article on “The Long Tail” in Wired magazine. “The Long Tail” took an opposing position to the Pareto principle of focusing on the 20% of high-impact areas that lead to 80% of the results. Chris suggested that many of the traditional assumptions around the 80/20 principle are actually artifacts of poor supply-demand matching and a market response to inefficient distribution. In his world, the long tail was traditionally ignored due to the challenges of finding local audiences and the constraints of the physical world. But successful companies have leveraged technology and innovative business models to unlock exponential value from the long tail (eg. Amazon, Netflix). These models ensured that even products that are in low demand or have low sales volume can collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters, if the store or distribution channel is large enough.