The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More

Picture a simple graph: on the left side sit the best-selling products of all, from the most-played album to the most-read book, stacked in descending order of sales. On the right side, stretching the ruler almost to infinity, sit millions of items that hardly anyone bought, one by one. Connecting the two sides is a line that plunges fast at the start and then drags along low for an enormous stretch. That low, long line is the long tail that gives the book its name.

Chris Anderson's central idea is simple to state and powerful in practice: when the cost of keeping a product available drops close to zero, the sum of everything in that long tail can weigh as much as, or more than, the few hits at the start of the curve. It isn't about abandoning the hit, it's about realizing there is a second market hidden underneath it.

That second market has always existed: people with odd tastes have always bought odd things. What changed wasn't people's taste, it was the viability of selling to them. Before the internet, reaching that audience cost too much to be worth it. Afterward, it stopped costing.

A physical record store has walls, and walls hold a finite number of shelves. Every square inch costs rent, electricity, an employee to restock and a salesperson to push the product on the customer. With limited space, the owner only puts on the shelf what sells fast, because an item sitting still is money sitting still.

That cold calculation explains why, for decades, radio, video rental stores, bookstores and record labels focused their effort on the same few hits. It wasn't a lack of talent spread around the world, it was a rent calculation. A niche film could be great and still never make it onto the shelf of a neighborhood rental store, because that space was already reserved for the new release everybody would ask for.

Readers, listeners and viewers never picked only hits because they only liked hits. They picked them because, in practice, that was almost all that was available to pick from.

The digital store has no walls. A music service can keep a track played once a year on the same server that holds the hit of the moment, and the extra cost of keeping that forgotten song available is practically zero. With no shelf rent, the reason to pull the obscure item from the catalog disappeared.

That's what Anderson saw happening with the first music streaming services in the early 2000s: a huge slice of the catalog, tracks a physical store would never stock, sold only a little each, but together they added up to a significant part of the service's revenue. And the same held for books in an online store and for movies in a subscription service.

The math changes: when keeping a product available costs almost nothing, it makes no economic sense to pull an item from the catalog just because it sells little. It only needs to sell something, now and then, to the right person.