The internet allows companies to reach niche audiences without adding substantially to cost

INNOVATE THIS:DANNY BAKER, the television writer and radio DJ, used to do a thing on his show about shops that sold disparate items under the same roof. This became a running gag as listeners called in reporting visits to shops stocking, for example, sofas and postage stamps, or new cars and wallpaper and, on one memorable occasion, fresh fish and model aeroplanes.

My journalism career is constructed on the same lines. When I'm not writing for Innovation, I spent quite a bit of my time covering cricket. And until very recently, these two parts of my life have remained resolutely separate. But a week or so ago, I sat in a drafty press briefing room at Lords listening to Shane Warne talking about The Long Tail, and my two worlds collided.

Okay, so Warne – the greatest living Australian and one of five Wisden Cricketers of the Century – didn’t mention Chris Anderson’s seminal work by name but it was there in the room. The legendary leg spinner is the front man for the Rajasthan Royals, an Indian cricket team launched three years ago to compete in the money spinning Indian Premier League, an event rapidly emerging as the single most influential in sport. The idea is to create the first truly “global sporting franchise” by stretching the Royals brand across five teams from the key cricket markets around the world. So there will be Hampshire Royals, Trinidad Royals and so on across to Australia and down to South Africa.

In doing so the Royals hope to reach the Indian diaspora who, the cliche runs, are cricket mad and notoriously hard to reach via traditional marketing channels. In the UK, they represent around 3 per cent of the population and around 6 per cent of GDP, a market with which the official governing body, the England and Wales Cricket Board, has tried and failed to engage, much to their irritation.

This is where Chris Anderson comes in. He first wrote The Long Tailas a feature in the US version of Wiredmagazine, before extending it into arguably one of the most influential business books of the last decade. It's less known that cricket played a central role in Anderson's theory from its earliest inception. The Long Tailrefers to how the internet defeats the classic economic problem of scarcity, allowing companies to reach niche audiences without adding substantially to cost. Previously, Indian cricket fans in Dublin for example, have been excluded from engaging with their favourite teams due to the economics of broadcast television that can only devote its scarce airwaves to content of mass appeal.

Now web and digital TV opens up cricket to the millions of fans outside of the domestic markets and if you have the right brand – and its worth noting that the stickiness of the Royals brand is as yet largely untested – pay dirt will follow.

There are about 20 million people in the Indian diaspora, most of whom are in countries that don’t broadcast cricket on TV. “Think of them as the Cricket diaspora, a distributed audience of potentially immense scale,” wrote Anderson. “The same for the Rugby diaspora, the Soccer diaspora, the Sumo diaspora and so on. Then turn the tables and do the same for the potential global audience for US sports: the Football diaspora, the Baseball diaspora the Basketball diaspora. Then extend that to news, TV shows, music and more. See what I mean?”

In this way, distributed markets are as good as concentrated ones. Long Tail video reunites disaporas through their common culture, even if they are seen as a niche culture in the world around them. To this end, the Indian Premier League has done a deal to distribute its content on YouTube, with the specific goal of reaching the Indian diaspora there.

At Lords, as Shane Warne was selling the Royals franchise, another set of numbers came to mind. Sometimes you read a statistic that just won’t leave you alone and the Ireland Funds’ figures on the Irish diaspora have been haunting me for months: there were 34 million Irish Americans registered in the US national census of 2000; five million Scots Irish, six million of Irish extraction living in Britain. There are 3.1 million people holding Irish passports living outside of Ireland. Then the final kicker: according to the comparative study, Ireland has a globalised community of 70 million people, of which just over four million live in Ireland.

Ireland’s cricketing ambitions are usually dismissed as an irrelevance by the game’s governing bodies and the national team has been largely marginalised since its historic 2007 ICC Cricket World Cup victory over Pakistan. But few, if any, of cricket’s major playing nations can boast a potential international fanbase of 70 million people.