Here's another term I just discovered. It's applied to marketing low-profit items over extended periods and/or to many customers as opposed to high profit items to . Isn't this term just restating the old theory of economy of scale?

I think the idea is that the Internet has made economies of scale less important. Brick-and-mortar stores can only carry things they know will move; Amazon can afford to offer books that might only generate a few sales a year and do so profitably by carrying hundreds of thousands of such books.

Over at Wired magazine they talk a lot about the long tail. Not enough Word fanatics in your home town? In the past, you were out of luck, but the internet allows those of us in the long tail to form a community. Music is an especially good example. Sure, there aren't enough people that like your music on the radio, but put it on the internet and chances are you'll find a bunch.

Youtube and Wikipedia are excellent examples of this. Sure, the topic is obscure, and no encyclopedia would have an entry, but Wikipedia does. See List of fish on stamps of Cote d'Ivoire, and you've got to kidding me.

quote:

On that page in Wikipedia:
This article is orphaned as few or no other articles link to it.

Now why does that not surprise me?

quote:

Originally posted by arnie:

quote:

On that page in Wikipedia:
This article is orphaned as few or no other articles link to it.

Now why does that not surprise me?

Well, this thread adds one more! :-)