The Long Tail

• "We sold more books today that didn't sell at all yesterday than we sold today of all the books that did sell yesterday."

The Long Tail derives its name from statistics, but specifically refers to an observation about Internet-enabled business: In many markets, the total volume of all lower-volume products is more than the total volume of all high volume products. Put in other terms: Efficiently selling many less popular products may work out better than selling a few very popular items. For example, much of Amazon's business is obscure books which would not be economically viable in a mortar-and-bricks store; the quote above is from an Amazon employee. Most games of interest around here fall onto that side of the distribution, within the industry itself, let alone the general market.