Long Tail

Long Tail is a term used in the statistical distributions of data to identify the Pareto curve, where the volume of data is sorted in decreasing order.

In the market for consumer goods, it is common to find such curves to illustrate consumer demand. Typically, high demand for a small set of products and like very small for a high number of products. In traditional economics, fixed costs of maintaining inventories and catalogs to calculate a value for the demand that defines the boundary between profit and loss.

In the case of the New Economy, this reasoning is put into question, particularly in the case of digital products. For example, the maintenance cost of a hot product is equal to the cost of maintaining a desired product by only a minimum number of consumers.

Focusing on the Long Tail becomes economically attractive, contrary to what happened before. Ultimately, all the products that exist in the area of the Long Tail has a market value equivalent to the popular products.