The Rise of internet's creative middle class

The essay begins by replying to a culturally influential concept at the time: the long tail. The concept was first introduced in a Wired article by the magazine's editor-in-chief, Chris Anderson, who described how Internet-based consumer companies like Amazon and Netflix can use online interfaces and smart-search capabilities to offer rarer and less popular products—those found in the "long tail" of traditional sales charts. These new markets have the potential to be large. A physical Barnes & Noble bookstore could only carry a hundred and thirty thousand titles at the time due to space constraints. Amazon discovered that outside of its hundred and thirty thousand most popular books, more than half of its sales originated from outside its retail real estate.