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And it's a horrendous problem for pretty much any business remotely shaped like Patreon. This is "the long tail".

That term was coined and popularized by Chris Anderson of Wired here https://www.wired.com/2004/10/tail/ which is behind a paywall.

Investopedia explains it: "The long tail is a business strategy that allows companies to realize significant profits by selling low volumes of hard-to-find items to many customers, instead of only selling large volumes of a reduced number of popular items. The term was first coined in 2004 by Chris Anderson, who argued that products in low demand or with low sales volume can collectively make up market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters but only if the store or distribution channel is large enough." (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/long-tail.asp)