The Long Tail

The internet has ushered in an era of unprecented choice, iTunes and Amazon offer nearly forty times as much as selection as a bricks and mortar superstore. As per the Pareto law, a market with a high freedom of choice will create a certain degree of inequality by favoring the upper 20% of the items ("hits" or "head") against the other 80% ("non-hits" or "long tail"). The group of persons that buy the hard-to-find or "non-hit" items is the customer demographic called the Long Tail, which was coined by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 Wired magazine article.

Successful Internet businesses have leveraged the Long Tail as part of their businesses and examples include eBay, Yahoo, Amazon, Netflix and Google.

In the social networking space, the Long Tail is being exploited by platforms such as Ning where more than 220,000 niche sites are hosted. Will the one-size-fits-all model of Facebook and MySpace will eventually give way to a multitude of narrowly focused sites ?