Wired 12.10: The Long Tail. Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts.
The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream. By Chris AndersonPage 1 of 5 next » Chris is expanding this article into a book, due out in May 2006. Follow his continuing coverage of the subject on The Long Tail blog. Story Tools. Long tail. An example of a power law graph showing popularity ranking. To the right (yellow) is the long tail; to the left (green) are the few that dominate. In this example, the areas of both regions are equal. In statistics, a long tail of some distributions of numbers is the portion of the distribution having a large number of occurrences far from the "head" or central part of the distribution.
The distribution could involve popularities, random numbers of occurrences of events with various probabilities, etc.[1] A probability distribution is said to have a long tail, if a larger share of population rests within its tail than would under a normal distribution. A long-tail distribution will arise with the inclusion of many values unusually far from the mean, which increase the magnitude of the skewness of the distribution.[2][3] A long-tailed distribution is a particular type of heavy-tailed distribution. Chris Anderson (Wired): Technology's long tail.