Editing Long tail (section)

==History==
[[Frequency distribution]]s with long tails have been studied by statisticians since at least 1946.<ref>A search for the phrase "long tail" in the database MathSciNet yielded 81 hits, the earliest being a 1946 paper by Brown and Tukey in the Annals of Mathematical Statistics (volume 17, pages 1–12).</ref> The term has also been used in the finance<ref>Bessis, Jöel "Risk Management in Banking". Wiley, 1995</ref> and insurance business<ref name="worldwidewords"/> 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".<ref>Obrist, Hans Ulrich  [https://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/obrist10/obrist10_index.html "The Father of Long Tails. An interview with Benoît Mandelbrot"], Edge.org, 2008</ref>

The long tail was popularized by [[Chris Anderson (writer)|Chris Anderson]] in an October 2004 ''[[Wired (magazine)|Wired]]'' magazine article, in which he mentioned [[Amazon.com]], [[Apple Inc.|Apple]] and [[Yahoo!]] as examples of businesses applying this strategy.<ref name="worldwidewords">{{cite web|last=Quinion |first=Michael |url=http://www.worldwidewords.org/turnsofphrase/tp-lon1.htm |title=Turns of Phrase: Long Tail |publisher=World Wide Words |date=24 December 2005 |access-date=25 December 2011}}</ref><ref>[[Chris Anderson (writer)|Anderson, Chris]]. [https://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html "The Long Tail"] ''Wired'', October 2004.</ref> Anderson elaborated the concept in his book ''[[The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More]]''.  

Anderson cites research published in 2003 by [[Erik Brynjolfsson]], [[Yu (Jeffrey) Hu]], and [[Michael D. Smith (economist)|Michael D. Smith]], who first used a log-linear curve on an XY graph to describe the relationship between [[Amazon.com]] sales and sales ranking. They showed that the primary value of the internet to consumers comes from releasing new sources of value by providing access to products in the long tail.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Brynjolfsson |first=Erik |last2=Hu |first2=Yu (Jeffrey) |last3=Smith |first3=Michael D. |date=2003 |title=Consumer Surplus in the Digital Economy: Estimating the Value of Increased Product Variety at Online Booksellers |url=https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/mnsc.49.11.1580.20580 |journal=[[Management Science]] |language=en |volume=49 |issue=11 |pages=1580–1596 |doi=10.1287/mnsc.49.11.1580.20580 |issn=0025-1909|hdl=1721.1/3516 |hdl-access=free }}</ref>