I recently read an article, titled The Long Tail, and an entrepreneur’s take on it http://bnoopy.typepad.com/bnoopy/2005/03/index.html I was not sure where it was going at first, mentioning a book that became popular years after it was written. At the end however, I learned an interesting economics lesson. In short, the idea presented is simple. You walk into any store, any retail business, and look around. The items contained in the store are usually the ones that sell the most. If you walk into a convenience store, the snacks and beverages you see make the store the most money. If you require an oddball item, it is not to be found here. However, the internet is a new medium for business. One interesting idea was, that out of the top 10,000 titles in any online media store (Netflix, Itunes…etc), 99% of them will rent or sell in any given month. You can’t find all of them in any store. Therefore, that means a loss of profit; profit never seen is profit lost. Just the other day, I was at my parent’s gas station. A person came in, and he wanted fuses. We had carried fuses, however, they were not very popular, so we replaced that space with something that was. I noticed a trend, every day, at least 5 people must come into our store, asking for something we did not have. You add all of that up, and that is lot of profit gone. The internet is waiting for profit to be exploited. A traditional retail store is not the way to maximize profits anymore. It’s worked: you go to Amazon, and chances are you can find the book you are looking for, even though it may not be very popular. Head over to a bookstore, and its a hit or miss. With the internet, you will always find what you are looking for. Joe Krauss has applied this to his software business, JotSpot. His company, “… is building a platform to make it easy and affordable to build long-tail software applications.” The internet is ripe with possibilities, you just have to find and use them for your advantage
