Frequency distributions with long tails have been studied by statisticians since at least 1946. The term has also been used in the finance and insurance business for many years. The work of Benoît Mandelbrotin the 1950s and later has led to

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The distribution and inventory costs of businesses successfully applying a long tail strategy allow them to realize significant profit out of selling small volumes of hard-to-find items to many customers instead of only selling large volumes of a reduced

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The long tail is the name for a long-known feature of some statistical distributions (such as Zipf, power laws, Pareto distributions

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Use of the phrase the long tail in business as "the notion of looking at the tail itself as a new market" of consumers was first coined by Chris Anderson. The concept drew in part from a February 2003 essay by Clay Shirky, "Power Laws, Weblogs and Inequality", which noted

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Competitive impact
Before a long tail works, only the most popular products are generally offered. When the cost of inventory storage and distribution fall, a wide range of products become available. This can, in turn, have the effect of reducing

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The long tail has possible implications for culture and politics. Where the opportunity costof inventory storage and distribution is high, only the most

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Effects of online access
In his Wired article, Chris Anderson cites earlier research by Erik Brynjolfsson, Yu (Jeffrey) Hu, and Michael D. Smith, who first used a log-linear

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