This is perhaps old news to many of you, but if you have not heard about this, you should.
Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine wrote The Long Tail, which first appeared in Wired in October 2004 and will become a book. He says on his blog: "The Long Tail is about how the mass market is turning into a million
niches. The term refers to the yellow part of the sales chart at left,
which shows a standard demand curve that could apply to any industry,
from entertainment to services. The vertical axis is sales, the
horizontal is products. The red part of the curve is the "hits", which
have dominated our commercial decisions to date. The yellow part is the
non-hits, or niches, which I argue in the article will prove equally
important in the future now that technology has provided efficient ways
to give consumers access to them thanks to the "infnite shelf-space
effect" of new distribution mechanisms that break thought the
bottlenecks of broadcast and traditional bricks and mortar."
