The Law of the Vital Few

For traditional retailers, business will always be where the sales volumes are. Pareto’s 80-20 principle states that "for many phenomena 80% of consequences stem from 20% of the causes." Or as it is popularly been understood in marketing - 80% of the sales should come from 20% of your inventory!

But the online market has its own rules, where storage space for the digital medium is essentially free, enabling online retailers to carry larger inventories and serve a niche market – iTunes, Google, Amazon ….

Source - Excite Query Distribution

The figure shows that Long Tail is about expanding the markets .. to include products and customers that are currently "sub-economic"!

So if Long Tail removes the distribution and information bottlenecks, can it be used as a strategy to address the needs of a scattered rural population? Esp in a place like India where every dialect is a niche market and every state a world in itself?