In a recent article published in the Harvard Business Review (n. 1-2 2008), university professor and forecaster Vito Di Bari predicts the appearance of the longer tail by 2015. Starting from Chris Anderson’s ground-breaking long tail concept, namely the grassroots diffusion of supply and demand on line, and the prevalence of “many niche items” as opposed to “few mass items”, Di Bari has hypothesized the growing density of the long tail concept, with users increasingly interested in specific, unique and local characteristics.

It is not difficult to see that within the next decade, the number of web users will progressively increase. However we will not see an increase in the number of skilled users, but rather the base level of web surfers will expand, users of the “Popular Web”, with a relatively low level of computer literacy but nonetheless possessing the technological devices necessary to gain access to the Web. A particularly telling example is the case of China, where there has been an 833.3% increase in the use of the Web from 2000 to today, but where the overall penetration of the Internet in the population reaches just 15.9%. This implies that the potential growth of China, and similarly that of many other Far Eastern nations, is enormous.

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