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Yahoo is shutting down about half of its content verticals
- minimaxir 11y agoBetter title: "Yahoo is shutting down about half of its content verticals"
- dang 11y agoOk, we'll use that. Thanks.
- nerfhammer 11y agoIt's from the article, but what is a "content vertical"?
- prawn 11y agoLike a category site. Like NBA news, or a site focusing on security articles or home renovation.
- gcb0 11y agowhy is this on hacker news? not trying to be an ass or anything. really. it's hardly a tech company, and this is apparently not affecting whatever tech side it still have. probably just execs trying to raise any number used to calculate stock prices this week and secure whatever fat bonus they will get by end of quarter.
- dfar1 11y ago"We know you come to Yahoo because of our distinct voice and unique blend of original content, aggregation and personalization." That made me lol. They should just keep their gossip columns (half the news on the front-page). The comments on those articles are always entertaining.
- outsidetheparty 11y agoYep, I came here with that same pull quote in my clipboard. "We had hoped that you would come to Yahoo because of our distinct voice and unique blend of original content, aggregation and personalization. But it turns out we don't actually have anything resembling that, so..."
- votr 11y ago>> The comments on those articles are always entertaining. Agreed. Who the heck are those people who comment? Are these comments aggregated from somewhere?
- AznHisoka 11y agoWhat about Yahoo Answers? I hate seeing their results show up in the top 3 when I do a Google search. They're always low quality and not useful.
- vram22 11y agoSimilar experience, the few times I have used it, sadly.
- Scoundreller 11y agoIt's free content, and they can sell ads on it. Personally, I'd love to own it.
- Scoundreller 11y agoAnd to add to that, I think Yahoo's biggest mistake with Answers, and a lot of their other properties, was to put them on subdomains. Their value would be a lot higher if they could seamlessly transfer ownership of the property. Rebranding costs users.
- sanarothe 11y agoFun fact: practically every assigned problem in undergrad chemistry, physics and math is solved on yahoo answers.
- SatoshiRoberts 11y agoWill fantasy football get cut soon?
- misterbwong 11y agoYahoo! Sports is one of the verticals that is staying. I'd assume that fantasy sports is under that umbrella.
- SatoshiRoberts 11y agoStaying where? With the holding company that has the Alibaba stock?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- smegel 11y agoThis might be the first good move Yahoo has made since Mayer took over. I can't think of a better example of a company that needs to shed worthless baggage and focus on high value propositions. And I am gobsmacked Yahoo has not at least made an attempt at a real social network. They have hundreds of millions of users, at the point they are in giving all their users an automatic account on Yahoo Social might be a dick move, but it's time start taking risks and see what unfolds.
- seanp2k2 11y agoThat didn't work out so well for Google, and they were in a lot better position to make it work than Yahoo is.
- TrevorJ 11y agoI'm not saying I agree with that move from a moral standpoint, but I'd bet money that Yahoo has a better chance of making it work. The demographics are different, there were enough tech-savvy people who understood Google's business model well enough to realize that co-opting people into a social network was going to give Google a scary amount of information. Yahoo isn't the behemoth that Google is, and I'm not sure that their audience is made up of people who understand that business model intimately enough to see the dangers.
- jacquesm 11y agoGoogle never was 'social' in any way shape or form, Yahoo at least always was a portal and social has been a function in many portals historically speaking. Whether they could make it work is a different matter altogether, critical mass is a hard thing to force but Yahoo seems to be in a position to do at least that. Even so, I highly doubt anybody would anchor their little home on the web to a sinking ship. It's a bit late now. Right after Mayer took over they might have had a shot at a move like that.
- skewart 11y agoWhat would be the point of building a social network for Yahoo? Better engagement? I'm pretty sure they always have been a destination for much of their audience (as opposed to depending on social sharing to get eyeballs, like, say BuzzFeed). So I'm not sure they'd have a whole lot to gain from it. Of course, their audience probably will spend more and more time on social networks, so stemming that tide somehow might make sense. Rather than building out a full-scale social network like Google+ they might be better served by aiming for something like Reddit, or HN. There's enough sociability and gamification to make it an engaging destination, but it's not confusingly trying to reproduce a Facebook. Of course maybe this kind of lightweight social network is what you meant in the first place.
- vidoc 11y ago> David Pogue is one of a kind – the most gifted tech reviewer on the planet, and easily the most entertaining. Wanted to LOL at this as the other time, i watched one of the 'life hacking' shows of this moron, and he demonstrated how to find out whether an egg is hard-boiled ... by spinning it...
- cant_kant 11y agoYahoo has digital magazines ? Why would a search company have junk like that ? How much other worthless baggage do they have ?
- jahewson 11y agoYahoo considers itself a "media" company. And therein lies the problem.
- cant_kant 11y agoI read the WSJ, FT, NYT, RCP, and The Hill if I want exposure to the "media". And HN for light entertainment. There is no way that I would look at inane posturing on Yahoo's blogs.
- vidarh 11y agoThat's your choice, but Yahoo's content verticals provides a huge proportion of their overall pageviews and ad revenue. The successful ones, like Yahoo Finance, are still huge.
- imaginenore 11y agoAd space. They need to do something with their audience. They tried various content niches. Some failed, some didn't.
- danso 11y agoYahoo hasn't been a search company for a very long time, having used Google's search results as early as 2000 and having used Microsoft since 2008: http://searchengineland.com/library/features/google-yahoo-search-deal http://searchengineland.com/library/features/google-yahoo-se...
- tn13 11y agoI guess a lot of Yahoo! employees will now be in mood to leave the company and this means a lot for other companies in bay area.
- snorrah 11y agoWhat the fuck is a content vertical?
- maxpupmax 11y ago"'To that end, today we will begin phasing out the following Digital Magazines: Yahoo Food, Yahoo Health, Yahoo Parenting, Yahoo Makers, Yahoo Travel, Yahoo Autos and Yahoo Real Estate,' Nelson wrote in a Tumblr post."
- kzhahou 11y agoIt's a subsection of the larger site, dedicated to a specific type of content. Vertical refers to them being fully-featured sites or application by themselves. For example, a real estate vertical might have search options dedicated to housing (number of bedrooms, square footage, etc), whereas the general site would only have generic search operators, not tailored to a specific use case. Hope that helps!!
- bitL 11y agoThen it's pretty silly to shutdown verticals as they most likely share the same source code as the rest. When you consider most SW companies try to establish as many revenue streams with as little people possible, cutting verticals is the last thing you want to do. Instead they should figure out how to share as much code as possible. But hey, it's Yahoo!
- dgemm 11y agoIt's the content that takes effort to maintain, not the code.
- toast0 11y agoWhen I left Yahoo travel in 2011, and there wasn't much shared source between verticals. We shared the same software stack (mostly), where that includes os, web server, PHP, MySQL, yui, a search engine, sometimes a PHP framework, but all of the pages were pretty specific to the vertical. Generic pages wouldn't work very well -- details for a hotel aren't really that similar to details for a car; and genericizing it means more process to make changes and a less compelling site. When I left they were working on a unified data processing system for this group of verticals, which didn't really work. Two years later, they just got rid of most of the content, in favor of big pictures and articles. I'm guessing that's why there's no traffic and they're shutting them down.
- kafkaesq 11y agoBy the time anything is thought of a "content vertical" it's pretty much past its time, on autopilot editorially-wise, and generally worth disregarding anyway.
- _delirium 11y agoA number of them are pretty lucrative (and seemingly consistently lucrative). On autopilot editorially yes, but that can be even better. For example, Yahoo does pretty well in the stock/finance content vertical, with Yahoo Finance. They've lost some traffic share with the entry of Google Finance (which is not far from a clone of Yahoo Finance), but there's quite a bit of ad money floating around there, which is why it's not one of the ones being shut down.
- kafkaesq 11y agoOh, there's plenty of ad revenue around some of these sites -- but does Yahoo's board actually care about the content of any of them? Any of them? That's what distinguishes legitimate news or entertainment outlets from "content verticals."
- mbritton72 11y agoGuess I should pull down all my Flickr images and back them up.
- halviti 11y agoIf you only have one copy of something, you don't have a backup.. and you should always have a backup.
- voltagex_ 11y agoTo where? Don't forget all the metadata as well. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10703650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10703650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10862663 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10862663
- batmansmk 11y agoThe name Mayer is not present in that article. That's definitely PR for the investors. Maybe to prepare a transition?
- matthewbauer 11y ago*Meyer
- abrookewood 11y agoA downvote for correcting an error? Why? EDIT: Ahh ... because the original was correct ...
- id 11y agoIt's Mayer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marissa_Mayer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marissa_Mayer
- tajen 11y agoWhat has Mayer done, apart from revoking the work-from-home program? Yahoo had revived its potential 3 years ago when they made a lot of good PR abut bringing in a high-profile CEO (plus, sorry, diversity, which could bring new creativity and new hopes). It almost sounds like they failed at integrating a new employee, and since this employee is the CEO, they failed at taking life-changing decisions to reshape the company.
- jorgecurio 11y agoLet's just recap what happened to Yahoo since Marissa took over: - wasn't able to turn the company around - wasn't able to monetize tumblr - wasn't able to capitalize on Alibaba shares - wasn't able to deliver return to investors - was able to parachute out of Yahoo with hundred million dollars+ Someone tell me, what CEO out there actually does anything that justifies their insane pay grade because often it looks like someone just waving a baton thinking he/she's a conductor despite how much the orchestra sucks. Maybe if it actually began investing what it paid out to a revolving door of CEOs looking to make a cool hundred million dollars....just then Yahoo will be a stock worth buying.
- BinaryIdiot 11y ago>Someone tell me, what CEO out there actually does anything that justifies their insane pay grade because often it looks like someone just waving a baton thinking he/she's a conductor despite how much the orchestra sucks. Hard to say what is and isn't related to the CEO. Microsoft's new CEO seems fantastic but it's hard to say what is and isn't contributed to him. I guess ultimately all the good and bad is contributed to every CEO regardless.
- dingo_bat 11y agoIt seems to me that most CEOs are simply irrelevant. The company does well if it does, and doesn't if it doesn't. It is rare that any one person is able to turn around the fortunes of their company. The only example that comes to mind right now is Steve Jobs.
- jorgecurio 11y agoCarl Icahn put it the best as he described his encounter with a CEO when he asked the question, what does a CEO actually do in a corporation? His answer was that it was a pretty pathetic one based on his observation. The CEO would take him to different floors and explain stuff but nothing that had any substance or material understanding of operating the country. Carl Icahn's view isn't alone. Nassim Taleb also blasts overpaid professionals and experts as "empty suits", they literally add little to no value to the organization other than how much they don't shut up about how great they are and what ivy league school they graduated from. I also have to conclude that CEOs are largely useless and could be replaced by a sock puppet operated by a homeless man.
- Laaw 11y agoHope they don't axe their fantasy offerings, I much prefer their site to the other options for my fantasy football.
- chris_wot 11y agoThat seems to be one of the few things going for them.
- GirlProgrammer 11y agoWhat's really amazing is that Yahoo has lasted as long as it has.
- PhasmaFelis 11y agoI can never figure out what it is Yahoo _does_. Their original core business (search) was demolished by Google many years ago. Their website looks exactly like any of a thousand different sketchy, clickbaity news aggregators, and all of the couple dozen "content verticals" in their sidebar are the same thing, only focused on a specific topics. They've also got a few services that other companies do substantially better (Mail, Weather, Flickr...) The only thing I see that's really relevant is Tumblr, which I hadn't even known was owned by Yahoo. Is that what Yahoo is these days? Clickbait news and Tumblr? How are they still regarded as a major tech company?
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- OedipusRex 11y agoDoes anyone have concrete evidence that Tumblr didn't get axed? I don't think the article said anything about it, unless that falls under "lifestyle".
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- rsynnott 11y ago"Content verticals" are their magazine-type news-ish sites, with in-house and/or syndicated content. Tumblr is user generated content, and is probably the only part of Yahoo that isn't in active decline; they're unlikely to axe it, though they still need to figure out how to make money on it.
- inesf 11y agoI'd say this is an unavoidable decision. Look into the stock price of Yahoo Inc. on Yahoo Finance, you will find out Yahoo should specialize its business/ contents a long time ago. If you set the range from 2000 to 2016, you will find a great drop there! http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=YHOO+Interactive#{"customRangeStart":943891200,"customRangeEnd":1455724800,"range":"custom","allowChartStacking":true} http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=YHOO+Interactive#{"custom...
- inesf 11y agoI'd say this is an unavoidable decision. Look into the stock price of Yahoo Inc. on Yahoo Finance, you will find out Yahoo should specialize its business/ contents a long time ago. If you set the range from 2000 to 2016, you will find a great drop there! http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=YHOO+Interactive#{"customRangeStart":943891200,"customRangeEnd":1455724800,"range":"custom","allowChartStacking":true} http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=YHOO+Interactive#{"custom...
- jharohit 11y agoQuite happy to see the "content verticals" being scrapped (food, travel,etc.) and retained (news, finance, fantasy sports,etc), respectively, are exactly amongst those I had summarized with a product analysis of Yahoo 2 years ago (I was hoping to get a job in Yahoo's product team - which I didn't). As in my analysis, I think it's a great start but there are still a LOT more products that can be dropped while some of the strong ones boosted. Here is the product analysis - https://medium.com/@jharohit/a-new-yahoo-part-1-5b9288595635#.9h6g5juia https://medium.com/@jharohit/a-new-yahoo-part-1-5b9288595635...
- crackpotbaker 11y agoI'm interpreting that the moment when Yahoo started falling apart was when they fired their whole vowpal wabbit team. If you can't value the state-of-the-art research being done in your labs, then you don't really value a thing.
- appleflaxen 11y ago> If you can't value the state-of-the-art research being done in your labs, then you don't really value a thing. that's a bit simplistic. vowpal wabbit is cool, but if the corporation can't figure out a path from the research to revenue, then it's smart to spin it off or shut it down. maybe the more amazing thing is that they couldn't find a competitive advantage in the vowpal wabbit project.
- crackpotbaker 11y agoyeah, it is a bit too black-and-white Microsoft is doing great stuff with it in finance, ads, and MR is doing amazing stuff.
- rezashirazian 11y agoLets not forget that they too shutdown part of their R&D department (Microsoft Research Silicon Valley) back in 2014.
- known 11y agoCopy/Compete; Yahoo is doing neither;
- sandymcm 11y agoI love that the goodbye memo from Dan Tynan is an advertisement for his talented team. Classy.
- cphoover 11y ago"vertical" might be the douchiest corporate speak word I know of.