The total sales of this large number of "non-hit items" is called "the long tail". 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 number of popular items. Anderson elaborated the concept in his book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. The long tail was popularized by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 Wired magazine article, in which he mentioned, Apple and Yahoo! as examples of businesses applying this strategy. The work of Benoît Mandelbrot in the 1950s and later has led to him being referred to as "the father of long tails". The term has also been used in the finance and insurance business for many years. crowdsourcing, crowdcasting, peer-to-peer), economic models, marketing ( viral marketing), and IT Security threat hunting within a SOC ( Information security operations center).įrequency distributions with long tails have been studied by statisticians since at least 1946. It is a term used in online business, mass media, micro-finance ( Grameen Bank, for example), user-driven innovation ( Eric von Hippel), knowledge management, and social network mechanisms (e.g. The long tail concept has found some ground for application, research, and experimentation. The specific cutoff of what part of a distribution is the "long tail" is often arbitrary, but in some cases may be specified objectively see segmentation of rank-size distributions. Sometimes an intermediate category is also included, variously called the body, belly, torso, or middle. This is used to describe the retailing strategy of selling many unique items with relatively small quantities sold of each (the "long tail")-usually in addition to selling fewer popular items in large quantities (the "head"). In business, the term long tail is applied to rank-size distributions or rank-frequency distributions (primarily of popularity), which often form power laws and are thus long-tailed distributions in the statistical sense. Note that there is no sense of the "long tail" of a distribution, but only the property of a distribution being long-tailed. Intuitively, a distribution is (right) long-tailed if, for any fixed amount, when a quantity exceeds a high level, it almost certainly exceeds it by at least that amount: large quantities are probably even larger. In statistics, the term long-tailed distribution has a narrow technical meaning, and is a subtype of heavy-tailed distribution. The term is often used loosely, with no definition or an arbitrary definition, but precise definitions are possible. The distribution could involve popularities, random numbers of occurrences of events with various probabilities, etc. In statistics and business, a long tail of some distributions of numbers is the portion of the distribution having many occurrences far from the "head" or central part of the distribution. In this example, the cutoff is chosen so that areas of both regions are equal. To the right (yellow) is the long tail to the left (green) are the few that dominate. An example of a power law graph showing popularity ranking.
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