LONGTAILs

Long tails are the makeup of the extremely small niche markets that are searched for on the web. It is the statistical distribution of the "other" things that makeup the Google searches or advertisements on the internet. Long tails are found in everything, whether you are searching top places to vacation, top places to live, or top Google searches. You find these long tails by seeing what the top few items are most popular in the search or the topic and the long tail makes up the rest. This is something that many advertisers use to help market new products or new services. Many marketers can use long tails to find what searches are the most popular to be able to market that product or to that particular market, others can use the information to find what else is being searched in the long tail and make a profit off of that. Excite.com was able to find the top 3% most popular searches and try to market to that crowd, they weren't able to find out how to make a profit off the other 97%, Google on the other hand was. Google was able to find the niche markets in the search engine and make a whopping $50 Billion off of this market. Many companies are able to use this technique to help build their profits and grow their products and services. Many companies such as Netflixs, Amazon.com, and Rhapsody music use long tail to help build a majority of their sales, a few of these companies makeup over 80% sales due to long tail marketing. By using long tail marketing companies were able to not just stock the top products but find what ALL people wanted and stock the most products in their market possible. One example is Rhapsody.com has an inventory of over 700,000 songs, and Wal-Mart only has 39,000. That is an amazingly huge difference is what you are offered as a customer. By using a long tail or examining long tails companies and individuals, depending on the data you're looking for, you will be able to satisfy everyone's needs and have a larger market willing to return.