The October 2004 issue of Wired

features an excellent article called The Long Tail, by Chris Anderson, the mag’s current editor. In the article Anderson very clearly describes a phenomenon that a lot of people have come at in different ways, but does so very succinctly and ties together the facts with the implications. Basically, Anderson suggests, product popularity can be graphed as a power law curve, but notes that at the “less-popular” end it takes a long time to cross zero. Adding all of those low-selling items together, then, adds up to a great deal of potential sales, and once distribution costs are mitigated - they would be prohibitive on the volume of any one iteam at that end of the curve - you are left with huge numbers. It’s an important article, highly recommended.