Nerdy definition (thanks of course to wikipedia). The phrase The
Long Tail (as a proper noun with capitalized letters) was first
coined by Chris Anderson in a 2004 article in Wired magazine  to
describe certain business and economic models such as Amazon.com
or Netflix. The term long tail is also generally used in
statistics, often applied in relation to wealth distributions or
vocabulary use. It is a soft corollary to the pareto
distribution. In simpler terms, if you think of the x-axis on
the graph above as representing the different products and the
y-axis as quantities of the product sold. The long tail says
that the products in the brown portion of the curve sell a lot
and the products in the yellow portion of the curve sell very
small individual quantities. What is interesting is that the
yellow portion extends for a while (a long while). If we can
keep selling products from the yellow portion cheaply, the
cumulative revenue from the yellow portion will eventually start
to match and rival the revenue fr