The phrase The Long Tail was first coined by Chris Anderson in a 2004 Wired Magazine article to describe certain business and economic models such as Amazon.com or Netflix.

Main arguments in his article are :

Many of our assumptions about popular taste are actually artifacts of poor supply-and-demand matching - a market response to inefficient distribution.The main problem, if that’s the word, is that we live in the physical world and, until recently, most of our entertainment media did, too. But that world puts two dramatic limitations on our entertainment. First is finding local customers to justify the retail investment of the product in the distribution channel. Second is the radio spectrum constraint where it can carry only a fixed number of channels.

Hit-driven economics is a creation of an age without enough room to carry everything for everybody. Not enough shelf space for all the CDs, DVDs, and games produced. Not enough screens to show all the available movies. Not enough channels to broadcast all the TV programs, not enough radio waves to play all the music created, and not enough hours in the day to squeeze everything out through either of those sets of slots.

Chris observed that products that are in low demand or have low sales volume can collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters, if the store or distribution channel is large enough

Most successful businesses on the Internet are about aggregating the Long Tail in one way or another. The new rules of the entertainment econonomy seem to be
**Rule 1: Make everything available
****Rule 2: Cut the price in half. Now lower it.
**Rule 3: Only Longtail business will not work .