The Economist has caught onto the “long tail”:
But the idea is now in vogue because of its particular relevance to the economics of e-commerce. Its popularity in this context is due to an article published last year by Chris Anderson, formerly a correspondent for The Economist, who is the editor-in-chief of Wired, a technology magazine. The article struck a chord: Mr Anderson is expanding it into a book, and talk of long tails is becoming a venture-capital clich?. “Business plans now have to have an obligatory long-tail passage,” he says. So when people invoke the long tail, what do they mean?The short answer is a shift from mass markets to niche markets, as electronic commerce aggregates and makes profitable what were previously unprofitable transactions.