The Long Tail by Chris Anderson - My Life Between Silicon Valley and Japan

http://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/
10/10/04 Objection #1
http://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2004/10/objection_1.html

"57% of Amazon's book sales are of books not available in stores"? That sounds high. Response: This is based on the work of Eric Brynjolfsson, an MIT economist. He and his team fit a standard Pareto power law distribution to Amazon sales rank and summed the total above 40,000 (the amount of books stocked by the average bookstore).

Consumer Surplus in the Digital Economy: Estimating the Value of Increased Product Variety at Online Booksellers(PDF)
http://ebusiness.mit.edu/erik/WorkingPapers/ConsumerSurplus.pdf?abstract_id=400940

I've now spoken to Jeff Bezos (and others) about this. He doesn't have a hard figure for the percentage of sales of products not available offline, but reckons that it's closer to 25-30%. That would put it in line with Netflix's and Rhapsody's figures. This is still a large fraction of their business, and the fastest growing segment. I've updated the version of my article on ChangeThis accordingly.

http://www.changethis.com/10.LongTail
http://www.changethis.com/pdf/10.01.LongTail.pdf
Wired 10/04 The Long Tail by Chris Anderson
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html
VentureBlog 10/5/04 The Internet And the Death Of 80/20
http://www.ventureblog.com/articles/indiv/2004/000907.html
12/22/04 Autohornblowing
http://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2004/12/autohornblowing.html

Needless to say, the ad industry is a great example of a place where the Long Tail has played out with surprisingly powerful effect. Google, for instance, found both the Long Tail of advertisers (individuals and small businesses who were far below the radar of any ad sales force) and potentially ad-selling publishers (from blogs and other microsites to larger content creators with unsold space). With an average of just a few cents per click for keywords and a self-service model, Google proved that there was big money to be made in a lot of small sales.
Or to put it another way: A small number times a very big number equals a big number.

12/27/04 Blog design in the age of RSS
http://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2004/12/blog_design_in_.html
12/30/04 Recommendations Rule!
http://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2004/12/recommendations.html
1/2/05 The biggest market is in the smallest sales
http://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2005/01/the_biggest_mar.html
1/3/05 Nanoeconomics
http://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2005/01/nanoeconomics.html
1/4/05 The "Pro-Am" Revolution
http://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2005/01/the_proam_revol.html
1/5/05 Variety is not enough
http://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2005/01/variety_is_not_.html
1/6/05 What is the Long Tail?
http://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2005/01/what_is_the_lon.html
Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment 1/3/05 Tail gunning, Wired editor Chris Anderson has started a good blog to follow up on his Long Tail essay and seed the ground for a book on the subject.
http://blogs.salon.com/0000014/2005/01/03.html#a804