<P> A frequency distribution with a long tail has 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 Mandelbrot in the 1950s and later has led to him being referred to as "the father of long tails". </P> <P> The long tail was popularized by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 Wired magazine article, in which he mentioned Amazon.com, Apple and Yahoo! as examples of businesses applying this strategy . Anderson elaborated the concept in his book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More . </P> <P> 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 . The total sales of this large number of "non-hit items" is called "the long tail". </P> <P> Given enough choice, a large population of customers, and negligible stocking and distribution costs, the selection and buying pattern of the population results in the demand across products having a power law distribution or Pareto distribution . It is important to understand why some distributions are normal vs. long tail (power) distributions . Chris Anderson argues that while quantities such as human height or IQ follow a normal distribution, in scale - free networks with preferential attachments, power law distributions are created, i.e. because some nodes are more connected than others (like Malcolm Gladwell's "mavens" in The Tipping Point). </P>

The long tail of internet news refers to the fact that