The concept drew in part from an influential February 2003 essay by
Clay Shirky, "Power Laws, Weblogs and Inequality"
[3] that noted that a relative handful of weblogs have many links going into them but "the long tail" of millions of weblogs may have only a handful of links going into them. Beginning in a series of speeches in early 2004 and culminating with the publication of a
Wired magazine article in October 2004, Anderson described the effects of the long tail on current and future business models. Anderson later extended it into the book
The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More (2006).