Our growing affluence has allowed us to shift from being bargain shoppers buying branded (or even unbranded)… — Chris Anderson

For a generation of customers used to doing their buying research via search engine, a company’s brand is not what the company says it is, but what Google says it is.

For the first time in history, hits and niches are on equal economic footing, both just entries in a database called up on demand, both equally worthy of being carried. Suddenly, popularity no longer has a monopoly on profitability.

A Long Tail is just culture unfiltered by economic scarcity.