The Long Tail

The long tail is the colloquial name given to a long-known feature of statistical distributions (Zipf, Power laws, Pareto distributions and/or Levy distributions ). They are also known as "heavy tails", "power-law tails" or "Pareto tails". Such distributions can be visualized by the image of the graph on this page. In these distributions a vast population of events occur very rarely in the yellow (or more generally have low amplitude on some scale, e.g., popularity or sales) while a small population of events occur very often in the red (or have high amplitude). The huge population of rare (or low amplitude) events is referred to as the long tail. In many cases the rare events—the ones on the long tail—are so much greater in number than the common events that in aggregate they comprise the majority.

Such distributions are surprisingly common. For example, the word "the" is the most common word in English text[2], while the word "disintermediation" isn't. However, most words used in English texts are part of the long tail.

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