Home featured Featured Marketing Tech Featured Search for the ‘long tail’ with Google Will Easton July 20, 2010 Google is often asked its opinion about the future of the internet. What will the next innovation be? What will the internet look like in 2020? The success of a company like YouTube – coming from nowhere and reaching hundreds of millions of users on its fifth birthday – shows how arbitrary an answer to this question can be. A key characteristic of the online world is how it rapidly evolves by tapping into the demands and interests of almost two billion people around the world, all connected, creating, communicating and searching for information. Chris Anderson’s 2004 article The Long Tail saw a new economic model born out of this global marketplace. His catchphrase redefined traditional understandings of a sustainable business and reshaped the way entrepreneurs assess their ‘addressable market’. The long-tail theory is also known as ‘economics of abundance’ or ‘everything, all the time’. It suggests that businesses capable of selling specialist, low-volume products to people actively seeking them can collectively match the revenues of large-volume, mass-market products, by tapping into a customer base which is no longer confined by geography. In this way, the internet has levelled the playing field for businesses. Not only has it cut the costs of logistics, distribution and service, but it has also opened up national and international markets to smaller local players. Consumers of every product and service are now searching online in their