The Long Tail

I recently heard about a new phenomenon taking place in the internet called the Long Tail. I tried to describe it my self but I couldn't word it properly, so here are some excerpts from Wikipedia.com.

"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. Examples of such mega-stores include Amazon.com and Netflix."

"A former Amazon employee described the Long Tail as follows: "We sold more books today that didn't sell at all yesterday than we sold today of all the books that did sell yesterday." In the same sense, Wikipedia has many low popularity articles that, collectively, create a higher quantity of demand than a limited number of mainstream articles found on a professional site such as Britannica."

"The term is derived from the XY graph that is created when charting popularity to inventory. For example, in the graph shown on this page the total inventory of Wikipedia articles is along the bottom line, while the popularity rating (web page hit statistics) is along the vertical axis. So, for example, the Wikipedia homepage would receive the most views and be on the far left in the red, while this page might be on the far right in the yellow, as would most of Wikipedia's articles. The same could be said for Amazon's book inventory or Netflix's movie inventory. The total volume of low popularity items exceeds the volume of high popularity items."

Well there ya go. I find this to be pretty freaking cool because this means that when you put all of us little no name bloggers together, we might become more powerful than a major news site like CNN. They say that there is power in numbers...indeed there is...indeed there is.