Long Tail

Long tail refers to a particular type of graph of sales where at first sight the bulk of the sales occurs in the first few days/weeks but it's deceptive in that IN FACT the bulk of the sales are in the long tail over months and even years.

Why it's important for the Internet is that Big Players like Amazon are selling more or as much in total of their many thousands of low selling (obscure) items than the hundreds of big selling items.

This is a new phenomena

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Tail