Below Belief

See VentureBlog for a fascinating discussion on the Internet and the “death of the 80/20 rule”.
It’s an idea which is gathering momentum as people everywhere realise that since the Internet reduces transaction and sales costs to virtually nothing that profitable business can be done on the long-tail. In blogging terms, 1 million sites with a 1,000 users is far bigger (and more profitable) than 100 sites with a million users. It’s happening already in all markets: Amazon makes all of its profit selling titles outside of the top-selling 100,000 titles. It has no competition there but great reach.
The internet is great for “disintermediation” – reducing the costs for a large number of small players; eBay being the prime example – allowing millions of people to trade to an audience they could never achieve alone.
That’s where we’re all going. Individuals and niche markets. The company I work for is going there too. Sooner than we think.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 23rd, 2005 at 12:15 pm and is filed under Internet trends, Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.