In the Internet and mobile Internet era, when the cost of paying attention to and obtaining information has dropped sharply, many products are prone to long-tail markets.

The long tail market is also called a "niche market".

Philip Kotler defined a niche in "Marketing Management" as follows: A niche is a narrower definition of certain groups. This is a small market and its needs are not well served, or "there is a benefit."

Foundation".

Once these niche products are gathered together, they can form a huge market, that is, a very large number multiplied by a relatively small number can still get a very large number.

This phenomenon has initially become prominent in Internet finance.

The large number of users of online payment and online banking is the foundation of the long-tail market for Internet financial products.

As of June 2013, the number of online payment and online banking users reached 244 million and 241 million respectively, with utilization rates of 41.4% and 40.8%.

Financial institutions such as traditional banks focus on some "VIP" customers and have no time to take into account the large number of ordinary users.

Judging from the monthly income of netizens, the vast majority of online shopping, online payment and online banking users belong to this type of ordinary users, and have no chance of obtaining higher returns from traditional financial services such as wealth management.

With the development of the Internet, especially the development of mobile Internet, the way users obtain financial information has changed. Financial supply and demand information is almost completely symmetrical, making P2P financing possible and developing rapidly in recent years.

The performance of P2P financing is that individuals can use "fragmented" funds to participate in projects that previously only required large amounts of funds to obtain higher returns.

This "fragmentation" of funds is one of the important features of Internet finance.

If the "fragmented" funds of netizens are integrated in some way, a huge long-tail market will be formed.

According to Alibaba, the average balance of each Alipay account is only a few hundred yuan, and the purpose of Yu'e Bao is to gather these "loose money".

In the 18 days since Yu’e Bao was launched, the cumulative number of users has reached 2.5156 million, and the cumulative transfers have exceeded 6.6 billion yuan.

This is also the most accurate manifestation of the long-tail market of Internet finance.

In addition, in the era of mobile Internet, many things such as information and Internet time are "fragmented". If the fragmented things are gathered together, they can be aggregated into huge commercial value.

For example, according to a CNNIC survey: Although mobile Internet access is highly fragmented, Chinese mobile phone netizens spend an average of more than 11 hours online per week. If multiplied by the number of mobile phone netizens (464 million), the total weekly online time on mobile phones has exceeded 5 billion hours.

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Once the mobile Internet is combined with finance, the long tail of financial niche product types that will be produced will be longer than we imagined, and can reflect the breadth and personalization. How to effectively develop this long tail and form a huge scale?

The long tail market is an issue that needs to be considered in the future of mobile Internet finance.