long tail

See also: longtail

English

Etymology

In the marketing sense popularized by journalist Chris Anderson in 2004, alluding to the long tail of a power law distribution.

Noun

long tail (plural long tails)

1. (marketing, sometimes capitalized) Sales made for less usual goods within a very large choice, which can return a profit through reduced marketing and distribution costs.
   • 2004 October, Chris Anderson, “The Long Tail”, in Wired‎^[1], →ISSN, archived from the original on 2016-01-12:

     What’s really amazing about the Long Tail is the sheer size of it. Combine enough nonhits on the Long Tail and you’ve got a market bigger than the hits.

   • 2014, Astra Taylor, quoting Eric Schmidt, chapter 4, in The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age, Henry Holt and Company, →ISBN:

     “I would like to tell you that the Internet has made such a level playing field that the Long Tail is absolutely the place to be, that there's so much differentiation, so much diversity, so many new voices. I'd love to tell you that that's in fact how it really works. Unfortunately, it's not,” Schmidt said.

2. (mathematics, probability) Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: The tail of a distribution that represents the rare occurrence of extreme values.

Translations

sales made for less usual goods

• French: longue traîne (fr) f

See also

• big head
• power law

Further reading

• long tail on Wikipedia.Wikipedia