Exclusive: The Latest On The Long Tail

In the months since the original publication of The Long Tail, two remarkable things have happened.

First (and ironically for a book about the power of niches) it became a bestseller, from the New York Times top-ten in America to the number one non-fiction book in China.

But more importantly, it was read and resonated in industries that I had never even considered as Long Tail markets. Hundreds of readers have written me to illustrate how the Long Tail is playing out in everything from church communities (Christian home schooling is the Long Tail of education!) to porn (perhaps the best example of the true diversity of taste in the human population, but I’ll leave it to others to, er, flesh that out).

I was often asked for more examples of Long Tail effects outside of the digital realms of media and entertainment. In the book’s earlier chapters I gave examples from eBay to Lego, but readers wanted to know whether the trend towards market fragmentation and consumer demand for niche products also applied to traditional retail and packaged goods, too.

The answer is that it does, although not quite as dramatically as in the pure digital realms where the economics of distribution have changed most rapidly.