29 ms·
What the fuck is a content vertical?
by snorrah 11y ago
What 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.
- bitL 11y agoOK, that explains it! Seems like "fiefdomization" of verticals is widespread :-(
- toast0 11y agoYou can call it a fiefdom, or you can call it decentralized decision making. It is definitely a large part of why the CEO of Yahoo, whoever it is today, is largely unable to make a huge difference. If I were CEO [1], I would actually embrace this, and return individual responsibility to the verticals. I'd also switch back the logo :) Anyway, in most of these verticals, Yahoo was competing with companies that were dedicated to the space, and had way more people working on it. Yahoo! Travel was in the neighborhood of 25 people, and TripAdvisor was closer to 1,000. We were able to compete because we could leverage yahoo platforms, and then do what we needed to do within our space.
- kafkaesq 11y ago"Vertical" as in a marketing channel for ads (disguised as a vaguely interesting website or publication). In longer form: basically a codeword for "A once vaguely or perhaps genuinely interesting website / channel / magazine / whatever but which is now (through various nefarious means) in the possession of Megacorp X, which, in turn, couldn't begin to give a toss about the actual content (let alone the so-called "community" of once passionate viewers / readers), other than through the perception that they serve some marketing demographic Y, real or imagined, to whom, they would like to fancy, they can sell zillions and zillions of ads to."
- GCA10 11y agoNicely defined.
- weisser 11y ago> Megacorp X ... couldn't begin to give a toss about the actual content If they did they probably wouldn't be in this position.
- bduerst 11y agoVertical is usually a classification, typically segmenting a cohort or population by industry. It's not limited to online marketing or ads.
- iscrewyou 11y agoFirst thing, for some reason, that came to mind was Google Reader. Not nearly the same thing but reading your response triggered my brain to think Google Reader. :(
- cft 11y agoThe development of such language ("content verticals") indicates the transition of a maturing industry from the founders/builders to the executives/gate keepers. They create such language to inflate the value of their executive work which is necessary in corporate politics, as opposed to the value creation process of founders who build new things and call them simply.
- jonahx 11y agoTranslation: Middle management invents slang like this to seem more important.
- cft 11y agoUpper management too. Have you ever been to a board meeting of a public company?
- mikkelewis 11y agoI'm sorry you've been rubbed the wrong way to be so bitter on just a term.
- bksenior 11y agoI couldnt care less. It just screams inexperienced teenager that thinks everything adult is stuuuuipd. Just had higher expectations for the discourse, thats all.
- auggierose 11y agoThis teenager is on HN 64 days longer than you.
- spacehome 11y agoAh, yes, HN -- the font of all life experience.
- 11y ago
- alaskamiller 11y agoIt's another word for corporate hashtag.
- return0 11y agoi prefer to read my content horizontally
- bksenior 11y agoContent that deals with a specific theme or topic. ie. Sports, Business, Stocks..etc
- cpeterso 11y agoA website.
- tptacek 11y ago"Content vertical" is the term Yahoo uses to describe the major sections of the programmed content (as opposed to search, or mail, or Tumblr, or whatever) on their site. It's tricky for Yahoo to communicate about how its business works, because Yahoo is the oldest and largest "portal" site, and so by design it tries to do (and milk revenue from) everything it can. Their business is complicated at a fundamental level by design, because sometime during the late 1990s, someone running Yahoo came to believe that the whole Internet was a kind of land grab, and the winner was going to be to the Internet what AOL was to, I don't know, the Internet for people who didn't know what the Internet was. Since they're a huge public company, they have to communicate facts about their business to investors, with some precision, and so they expose you to terms like these. A non-crazy way to think about Yahoo is like a magazine publisher that also owns a couple somewhat popular applications (mail, search). The "content verticals" are the magazines.
- jonahx 11y agoThanks for the additional context. > Since they're a huge public company, they have to communicate facts about their business to investors, with some precision, and so they expose you to terms like these. Isn't a term like "content vertical", though, used with investors precisely for its imprecision? That is, it imparts of flavor of mysterious business strategy and arcane MBA knowledge to the most mundane of activities: creating multiple sub-websites that focus on different content. To extend your analogy, if a publishing company wants to precisely communicate the decision to publish new magazines, they'd say "this quarter we added four new magazines on the topics A, B, C, D to our roster." If they wished to make it sound like something deeper was going on, they might say, "we're deepening our reach into multiple markets by adding new content verticals."
- look_lookatme 11y agoIt's just a term of art specific to media. There is no conspiracy here.
- jonahx 11y ago
- lisper 11y agoWas it really necessary to drop an F bomb to ask this question?
- pluma 11y agoAs a European I find the phrase "dropping an F bomb" far more offensive than the word "fuck". "Fuck" is an expletive based on a slang term for sexual intercourse. "Dropping bombs" is a violent military act that results in horribly maiming and murdering people, often including civilians. Get your priorities straight.
- lisper 11y agoI'm sorry if you were offended, but "dropping a bomb" is a common idiomatic expression that has nothing to do with physical violence. It simply means, "to say something shocking or unexpected." http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/drop+a+bomb http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/drop+a+bomb
- pluma 11y agoAnd you find that idiom less offensive than a slang term for having sex?
- lisper 11y agoPersonally I don't find either one offensive. But the word "fuck" is generally considered, at least in American culture, to be the most offensive of all expletives, while the idiom "drop a bomb" is considered completely inoffensive. In fact, it was news to me that it was considered offensive in Europe. Where in Europe do you live?
- pluma 11y agoGermany. Maybe I should qualify by saying that I don't find "fuck" particularly offensive to begin with (American attitudes towards swearwords are strongly defined by its Puritan history). There is a similar idiom in German ("die Bombe platzen lassen", "letting the bomb pop") but it has a different meaning (i.e. revealing shocking/surprising information) and is different from how we refer to explosions (e.g. "zünden", "detonate") making it sound more like it's describing a balloon than explosives. I wonder why Americans consider "fuck" more offensive than other expletives, especially considering it's so widely used (and in some social contexts wouldn't raise any eyebrows at all). I guess it falls back to Puritanism again: not only is it a swearword, but it's describing a sinful act -- not simply sexual intercourse but likely sexual intercourse in a very non-Puritan way (i.e. not soberly between a married faithful couple for purely reproductive purposes). I should also add that English swearwords in German are generally far less offensive than the German equivalents, though even then they're far more socially acceptable. I also think that the German equivalent of "fuck" as an expletive is actually borrowed from English and an artefact of the influence of English language media. EDIT: I also find Puritanism far more appalling than any swearword or expletive.
- patio11 11y agoA web application or applications which hosts writing, audio, video, or a mix of all three in the middle of purpose-written computer code. The writing/audio/video has a consistent theme; Thomas' analogy of a magazine is apt, or maybe a niche cable channel. Yahoo spends some small X% of their resources on the web applications, some larger X% of their resources on the writing/audio/video, and some much larger X% of their resources on an advertising sales force which explains to e.g. brokerages why those brokerages should be investing their ad dollars on Yahoo Finance in parallel to MSNBC or Fortune Magazine. Moreover, the phrase "content vertical" gets to the heart of Yahoo: Yahoo is a media company which just so happens to write in-house software occasionally, not a software company with a media arm.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- mc32 11y agoTo me basically it means their own private-label category specific content farms which they use to grab eyeballs and thus sell ads.
- unixhero 11y agoIt's "I'm a CEO speak" for categories.
- EasyTiger_ 11y agoGod I hate the bullshit terms these people make up for their 'important work'