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.It is the aggregate sales, use, or other participation of all those people in the newly available niches that turns the massive expansion of choice into an economic and cultural force.The Long Tail starts with a million niches, but it isn’t meaningful until those niches are populated with people who want them.Collectively, all of this translates into six themes of the Long Tail age:In virtually all markets, there are far more niche goods than hits.That ratio is growing exponentially larger as the tools of production become cheaper and more ubiquitous.The costs of reaching those niches is now falling dramatically.Thanks to a combination of forces including digital distribution, powerful search technologies, and a critical mass of broadband penetration, online markets are resetting the economics of retail.Thus, in many markets, it is now possible to offer a massively expanded variety of products.Simply offering more variety, however, does not shift demand by itself.Consumers must be given ways to find niches that suit their particular needs and interests.A range of tools and techniques—from recommendations to rankings—are effective at doing this.These “filters” can drive demand down the Tail.Once there’s massively expanded variety and the filters to sort through it, the demand curve flattens.There are still hits and niches, but the hits are relatively less popular and the niches relatively more so.All those niches add up.Although none sell in huge numbers, there are so many niche products that collectively they can comprise a market rivaling the hits.Once all of this is in place, the natural shape of demand is revealed, undistorted by distribution bottlenecks, scarcity of information, and limited choice of shelf space.What’s more, that shape is far less hit-driven than we have been led to believe.Instead, it is as diverse as the population itself.Bottom line: A Long Tail is just culture unfiltered by economic scarcity.HOW LONG TAILS EMERGENone of the aforementioned happens without one big economic trigger: reducing the costs of reaching niches.What causes those costs to fall? Although the answer varies from market to market, the explanation usually involves one or more of three powerful forces coming into play.The first force is democratizing the tools of production.The best example of this is the personal computer, which has put everything from the printing press to the film and music studios in the hands of anyone.The power of the PC means that the ranks of “producers”—individuals who can now do what just a few years ago only professionals could do—have swelled a thousandfold.Millions of people now have the capacity to make a short film or album, or publish their thoughts to the world—and a surprisingly large number of them do.Talent is not universal, but it’s widely spread: Give enough people the capacity to create, and inevitably gems will emerge.The result is that the available universe of content is now growing faster than ever.This is what extends the tail to the right, increasing the population of available goods manyfold.In music, for instance, the number of new albums released grew a phenomenal 36 percent in 2005, to 60,000 titles (up from 44,000 in 2004), largely due to the ease with which artists can now record and release their own music.At the same time, bands uploaded more than 300,000 free tracks to MySpace, extending the tail even further.The second force is cutting the costs of consumption by democratizing distribution.The fact that anyone can make content is only meaningful if others can enjoy it.The PC made everyone a producer or publisher, but it was the Internet that made everyone a distributor.At its most dramatic this is the economics of bits versus atoms, the difference between fractions of pennies to deliver content online and the dollars it takes to do it with trucks, warehouses, and shelves.Still, even for physical goods, the Internet has dramatically lowered the costs of reaching consumers.Over decades and billions of dollars, Wal-Mart set up the world’s most sophisticated supply chain to offer massive variety at low prices to tens of millions of customers around the world.Today anybody can reach a market every bit as big with a listing on eBay.The Internet simply makes it cheaper to reach more people, effectively increasing the liquidity of the market in the Tail.That, in turn, translates to more consumption, effectively raising the sales line and increasing the area under the curve.The third force is connecting supply and demand, introducing consumers to these new and newly available goods and driving demand down the Tail.This can take the form of anything from Google’s wisdom-of-crowds search to iTunes’ recommendations, along with word-of-mouth, from blogs to customer reviews
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