"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.
> 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."
I think every field has its own subset of language that makes most sense to them. I am sure a lot of words that make perfect unambiguous sense to tech people, would confuse non-tech people who would say "why don't you simply say it like..."
The term "vertical" seems to be common amongst executives. I first came across the term when my father asked about the verticals of companies I was applying to. It appears to mean "line of business" or "field of work" or "subset of market". For example a company catering to textile industries, banks, pharmaceuticals, would have these "verticals".
So "content verticals" immediately made sense to me as "subsets of the content they produce".
PS: "we're deepening our reach into multiple markets by adding new content verticals." makes perfect sense because executives really do see the move as moving into multiple markets (or market segments) as each new magazine caters to a different class of people
I don't think there's a conspiracy. I get it's a totally normal thing for in-groups to use slang, and that everyone in the business world does it, and all that. I'm not saying they're evil or out to get us. They're just people doing their thing. But it's still a bullshit term.
It makes some sense in comparison to horizontal when looking at the structure of an organisation: you can either slice it at seniority level, so all the workers together in one layer, all the managers, all the upper management, all the executives and so on.
Or, you can slice it vertically, into departments, with all the levels of seniority together grouped by what they're actually doing. You could call them departments, you could call them markets, but those terms are already taken.
The 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.
I completely agree. That's why we founders, who are much better at using simple language, should ideate a way to pivot our unicorns to disrupt this space. These executives will discover they're not a culture fit in this paradigm shift where sweat equity is properly valued.
(Can I get some help working in 'gamification', 'bootstrapping', and 'dogfooding'?)
It's not that specific. It's everywhere. I see it all the time in programming terminology.
There are technical terms that annoy me when I first hear them. It appears people are trying to inflate their worth by using unnecessarily specific or complicated terms. Then on some random night when I'm bored I'll familiarize myself with the term and all its' nuances and from that point forward it's more efficient to use the formerly-annoying-and-seemingly-high-and-mighty term to communicate exactly what I mean in a single word or phrase.
That's just how language works. But like anything, some folks will latch onto anything to inflate what they bring to the table by over-complicating things.
Thankfully the divining rod for weeding these people out is often as simple as asking them two to three questions on the topic to discern if they're leveraging their vocabulary or hiding behind it.
I've had the same experience. I'd add that after you learn and internalize the slang, you can usually see it falling into one of three broad categories:
1. It's a genuinely useful term, descriptively named, for which no good succinct alternative exists: eg, "outrage porn."
2. A genuinely useful term, poorly named, but excusable because it already has an entrenched history and community using it: eg, "monad" in functional programming.
3. A confusing term, poorly named, for which many good alternatives exist, but which continues to thrive on meme status, or for political reasons, within a particular community. A lot of marketing and business slang, and PC terminology, falls into this category.
So I think it's valid to criticize slang in category 3. That is, not all slang is created equal, or for equal reasons.
This post (http://stackoverflow.com/a/194207/438615) makes a good case for "computation builder." Also, as there are abstract data types (stack, queue, etc), monads are abstract control flow types. Another answer there suggests "control type". Something even better is probably possible, but I like both of those better than "monad".
Would you prefer them say "categories of content on the site that tend to deal with a central topic or theme." Content vertical is a pretty standard term.
These kind of judgemental blanket statements have no place on a site like this,and worse show a lack of experience working in any large company. Please try to be more productive when contributing.
Interesting, as "content" on its own has been / can still be a somewhat dirty word in this context. Some folks who write stories, take photos, or shoot video don't appreciate their works referred to as content. Some still prefer author, photographer, film maker to "content creator." But it's a handy, encompassing term.
When multiple authors, photographers, videographers create works around similar topics and themes, "content verticals" can be a useful term. Still some have little love for it.
Most trades develop a vernacular particular to the trade...this makes it easy for those in the trade to distinguish between knowledgeable tradesmen and those who are new...
It's a rite of passage...
Go work a construction site...a hospital...a day care center...if you're new you'll either pick up on the "code" or be somewhat of an outsider until you do...
But it's more than a content category. It's not like "Posts tagged with 'Entertainment'". It's more like a sub domain. entertainment.yahoo.com vs finance.yahoo.com
Edit: fashion.yahoo.com isn't real, so I changed it to entertainment.yahoo.com
On a typical day, this site does a pretty good job of inflating the irony aneurysm building up in my psyche, but I'm afraid that if I read a comment from a tech nerd complaining about how "executives" use jargon to obscure what they do, that aneurysm will certainly rupture.
I don't think it's as simple as that. The complaint is about the vulgarity of executive jargon. The underlying problem with it all is the belief that they are at the top of a non-meritocratic hierarchy. Positions that have been attained largely bullshitting and politicking (and of course hard work, just not necessarily productive hard work). The jargon is just a small part of that.
Fundamentally if someone can program well they will get hired. Whether one is suited to run a large company or not well its complicated and the outcomes often make the world (and indeed their companies) a worse place. At least that is the at least somewhat justified belief.
That said, personally I think it is reasonably descriptive. What I do object to is when it leaks into normal life. Get new 'content'... my you have got good taste in content (points to bookshelf)
Also, people referring to themselves as consumers, rather than customers.
"Doing anything nice this weekend, Bob?"
"Just gonna sit in, consume some content."
I've been lurking in your /threads page for a good while, and this single-scentence post conjures up an excellent comic strip image. Keep up the good work!
It'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.
Then 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!
When 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.
You 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.
"'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."
"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."
First 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.
A 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.
As 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.
I'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."
Personally 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?
Germany. 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.
Heh, I was born in Juelich. But I've lived in the U.S. since I was 5 so I'm culturally American.
> I guess it falls back to Puritanism again
Yep, pretty much.
> I also find Puritanism far more appalling than any swearword or expletive.
I can't really argue with you about that. Nonetheless, I think it's important to be judicious in one's choice of occasions to break societal norms, even when those norms aren't rational.
