The Long Tail is not about lifecycle
Ross is commenting on a post by Scoble which mistook the long tail for something totally different. As Ross says well, this is not about the product lifecycle curve. Early adopters are not the long tail. As Ross says a key here is transaction costs as well as search costs and storage. You will likely find some long tail in your market. Let’s take something a bit out of the ordinary for this. One good example is things like Spreadshirt of CafePress. Both of those shops allow you to make your own T-Shirt in low volume. When things started out in the clothing industry, T-Shirts were probably really hard to make and especially flock print was not too easy and needed to be done in bigger volumes. You needed to be a big customer to do this. You needed to have a brand to sell the T-Shirt in high volume. Then people started to do this on their own, in smaller shops around the world. This of course works great but you will only have so many people doing that in your shop. Now come the web shops that will let you build your own T-Shirt, and anyone can do it, in tiny volume, because both of the backends have technology that enabled them to make t-shirts in good quality one by one efficiently. On top of that they have the internet to reach the world.
Now we have a big department store selling CK T-Shirts in the hundreds of thousands a year in 1000 department stores. That mass market. Then we have Spreadshirt and CafePress who will sell 100 T-Shirts of 100.000 different small shops over a year, in the end selling mor T-Shirts than the CK example above, but only to tiny audiences and in lots of different fits and sizes. This wouldn’t have been possible previously, because you wouldn’t have had the distribution system, nor the printing technology, or the possibility to reach these tiny audiences efficiently.
That’s an example of the long tail. Others would be Amazon selling loads of books that you will find in no other book store because they can connect 10s of millions of people world wide to the 3 issues they have somewhere. Or Google efficiently handling advertisement on blogs due to their content targeting. It’s really volume matching. Matching the right volumes over longer distances that were previously not matchable.
It’s very likely worthwhile to just think what they long tail can mean for you. Sell side advertising is something that will become very real (already well into thinking into it) to some extent due to the efficient use of the long tail and the different market specifics that are available there.