Yahoo is shutting down about half of its content verticals | Hacker News Reader

Yahoo is shutting down about half of its content verticals

capitalnewyork.com

216 pointscoloneltcb190 comments

What the fuck is a content vertical?

"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.

Thanks 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."

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

A vertical in MBA-speak is a specialised niche market which typically has plenty of competition.

It's eccentric to consider - say - food journalism as a vertical, because it really isn't.

But then "We're closing some of our online magazines" wouldn't sound nearly as decisive and strategic-y.

In publishing, it is absolutely common to say that a particular magazine serves a vertical.

I don't think you can usually draw any conclusions regarding either 'niche status' or 'presence/lack of competition' from the word vertical.

One day you'll realise that just because your Dad told you, it doesn't make it any less gibberish.

In all seriousness though, just because your Dad told you, it doesn't make it any less gibberish.

It's just a term of art specific to media. There is no conspiracy here.

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.

I believe the word you are looking for is jargon.

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.

Great explanation. Thank you!

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'?)

Don't forget "leverage" instead of "use", "orthogonal" instead of "unrelated", and "onboarding" instead of "training"!

You forgot to pivot a second time.

It seems that the adjective 'completely' can be used to mean 'dis-'.

I couldn't agree more with your learnings.

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.

> monad ... poorly named.

Depends on your study of history. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monadology#The_metaphysics_of_...).

... on second thought, I guess that's exactly what you were saying.

Do you have a suggestion for a replacement for "monad"? It's always been such an opaque term to me, even as I began to get a grasp of it.

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".

FlatMappable :-)

Very well put!

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.

This guy is a straight shooter with upper management written all over him

What would you say ... ya do here?

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...

It's the price of true admission...

"Content categories" would probably work fine.

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

It really isn't.

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!

how is "content vertical" any more a sign of the apocalypse than, say, "threaded tree" or "responsive site"?

>indicates the transition of a maturing industry from the founders/builders to the executives/gate keepers.

Is that what you think? It certainly gave me pause; "startups" are some of the worst offenders when it comes to spewing jargon.

>as opposed to the value creation process of founders who build new things and call them simply.

Oh brother...

Uh... yeah, that's why the startup industry has absolutely no trade language, right?

Translation: Middle management invents slang like this to seem more important.

I'm sorry you've been rubbed the wrong way to be so bitter on just a term.

I couldnt care less.

It just screams inexperienced teenager that thinks everything adult is stuuuuipd. Just had higher expectations for the discourse, thats all.

This teenager is on HN 64 days longer than you.

Ah, yes, HN -- the font of all life experience.

Upper management too. Have you ever been to a board meeting of a public company?

Everyone invents slang to seem more important.

I had to reread this a couple of times to properly parse - was it a meta way of answering the question?

Bro. Yahoo has been a publicly traded company since 1996. What did you think?

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.

Hope that helps!!

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!

It's the content that takes effort to maintain, not the code.

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.

OK, that explains it! Seems like "fiefdomization" of verticals is widespread :-(

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."

Vertical is usually a classification, typically segmenting a cohort or population by industry. It's not limited to online marketing or ads.

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.

> Megacorp X ... couldn't begin to give a toss about the actual content

If they did they probably wouldn't be in this position.

Nicely defined.

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.

Content that deals with a specific theme or topic. ie. Sports, Business, Stocks..etc

God I hate the bullshit terms these people make up for their 'important work'

To me basically it means their own private-label category specific content farms which they use to grab eyeballs and thus sell ads.

Was it really necessary to drop an F bomb to ask this question?

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.

Get your priorities straight.

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."

http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/drop+a+bomb

And you find that idiom less offensive than a slang term for having sex?

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.

> Germany.

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.

It's

"I'm a CEO speak" for categories.

A website.

i prefer to read my content horizontally

It's another word for corporate hashtag.

This 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.

What 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.

Why does the world need yet another social network?

I'm defining "social network" pretty broadly, including websites that have a strong social component, like HN, reddit and imgur. These kinds of online communities tend to make people happy, and they let them form friendships and exchange ideas. If a new one emerges then it's probably making some critical mass of people happy.

I would guess that Yahoo's audience might not have a ton of exposure to all the different social networks out there on these days, and they might appreciate a stronger community aspect to Yahoo. A Facebook clone wouldn't make sense, but something that gave it more of the flavor of imgur or HN might. Though I suspect that would be really hard to pull off.

It wouldn't be the bet thing for Yahoo to focus on, but it wouldn't be the worst.

They've done Buzz! (very Digg/reddit/HNews-like) and a handful of other social net products since their founding. Executing that well -- like with most things -- takes focus and willingness to get behind something particular, rather than everything, and Yahoo's often spread their peanut butter a little thin. http://www.wsj.com/public/article/SB116379821933826657-0mbjX...

> What would be the point of building a social network for Yahoo? Better engagement?

Maybe just more engagement. People spend a hell of a lot of time on Facebook.

I am thinking a social networking site like Facebook, combined with a mobile app that not only acts as a client to the social network, but also emulates the easy sharing features of instagram/snapshat/periscope. Something the younger generation will want to use all day.

I mean, the hardest thing about building a social network is getting users. It is not as simple as "built it and they will come". Yahoo already has the users, to not leverage them seems crazy (or maybe I am).

And in response to other comments about Tumblr...just no. Tumblr is not a social network, it is a bogging site, one of many. Facebook doesn't have a stand alone blogging site, and Google has left it's one to rot, there is probably a good reason for this.

> the hardest thing about building a social network is getting users

Going by the trainwreck that was Google+, I think you're completely wrong on this one.

I disagree. There's a big difference between "users" and active, engaged users. Google+ may have had a lot of users on paper, but relatively few people actually spent much time using it.

The hard part about building a social network for a company like Google, or even Yahoo, isn't getting user accounts. It's making something that people actually want to use.

I don't think you're arguing with me, because that was exactly my point as well?

Google+ was going great guns until they started forcing people to use real names everywhere. There's a big step between "building a social network" and "trying to own your users' real life identities".

They've already got Tumblr; they just need to... do something, anything at all with it, rather than just letting it sit there. Integrate Yahoo's various news properties into the feed, and vice-versa. Make all of the commenting on every Yahoo property into gradual-engagement reblogs on a Tumblr blog you're not even realizing you're creating as you're creating it. Etc.

Tumblr is tricky. Mess with it and they'd very quickly have a rapidly escalating campaign seeking peoples head on a stake. Tumblr users already regularly express deep suspicion or hate for Tumblr staff whenever they tweak some small aspect of the service.

If they get it right,, I agree it could be a big deal, but the potential for totally destroying it by accident is great.

Many Tumblr users are still angry about what they saw as an attempt to get rid of all of the porn there too.

This would be a disaster of epic proportions. Tumblr has a rabid user base that's not interested in any of that and would scream bloody murder if it happened.

Does that matter? Those users aren't paying. Yahoo could very well kick 9/10ths of Tumblr's userbase off the site while retooling to make a profit from the other 10%, and it wouldn't change a single thing about their financials.

To put it another way: right now, Tumblr is making no money for Yahoo. Destroying the site and its reputation to make it into something profitable is actually the sensible move, compared to just leaving it alone. If they just wanted to leave it alone... why did they acquire it?

To go even further, though, I don't think they need any of Tumblr's current userbase. When I said that "Yahoo has a social network: Tumblr", I wasn't referring to the userbase, but to the codebase and the built-up staffing with social-network-running expertise. They could throw out Tumblr-the-website, and transfer all the people working on it to a new, fresh-from-scratch social network project (maybe built on Tumblr-the-backend), and it'd still be a more sensible strategy than leaving it alone.

The users are the hard part of a social network, not the staff or the codebase. Pissing off users leaves a stench that keeps away new people.

Source: worked for a social network that died by sacrificing users for an idealized vision of what it could be.

Tumblr is a content machine. Killing 90% of your userbase means killing most of your content.

What good is that content, if you're not monetizing it, from a bottom-line standpoint? You're actually losing money hosting all that content, paying for servers, storage, and bandwidth, if you're not making back something from it.

Sure, but without content or users you have nothing to monetize, and your few leftover users will disappear.

They tried with Yahoo 360 [1]. It flopped tremendously.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_360%C2%B0

Yahoo circa 2000 was a social network, with your yahoo account connecting messaging, chat, games, websites, and loads of other stuff.

It was a bunch of siloed social mini-networks who's only common factor was the account, and given its "media company" form, and who called the shots, I doubt there was ever a realistic prospect of connecting them into something combined and semi-coherent like Facebook.

That common factor enabled YCHT/YMSG which allowed for ad-hoc communication in and out of those silos. That friends list could chat, play sports, send emails, play chess, probably other things (those are all I did). It wasn't formal in that there wasn't an activity stream (as far as I remember; I didn't work there and I was like 13 at the time) in each silo, but people I met playing chess moved to chat and then to other games.

That didn't work out so well for Google, and they were in a lot better position to make it work than Yahoo is.

I'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.

Google 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.

Yahoo fucked up Yahoo Answers (original SO) along with the comments section on their news. Both of these were social networks with millions of users.

> And I am gobsmacked Yahoo has not at least made an attempt at a real social network.

3: Yahoo 360, Yahoo Kickstart and Yahoo Buzz.

I mean since Mayer took over.

> Yahoo 360

This sounds like it could have been something worthwhile, although it seems to have a focus on personal/website blogging rather than true social networking (focus on friend updates and sharing).

And while it was apparently launched in 2005, it looks like it might have been developed in 1995 and put on hold for a decade.

By 2012 (since she took over), Facebook had won the social war. And Yahoo had nothing of note to pull in the next generation (for whom FB bought IG).

They have made attempts at social network, with plans just the way you propose.

They had a major backend overhaul called OpenSocial, that was supposed to bring social networking to Yahoo. I think the overhaul took 5 years and the way I understood, their plan was to start build outward facing social networking once OpenSocial was completed.

When it was finally done, they had been through something like 2 CEO's and nothing came of it.

Quite 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...

What 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.

Fun fact: practically every assigned problem in undergrad chemistry, physics and math is solved on yahoo answers.

My dad loves solving the physics problems on yahoo answers.

I'd love to see an example

I dont know what id he uses. I'll ask next time.

Don't forget biology: "How is babby formed?"

I can't speak for chemistry or physics, but that must be an incredibly poor mathematics program? I can't remember seeing anything past calc on yahoo answers and those answers were almost always wrong, or correct but with wrong explanations.

I love how Yahoo Answers is basically a crowd-sourced unit conversion engine that makes lots of mistakes. I notice it show up a lot below the Google-supplied unit conversion I'm actually seeking.

Example: https://www.google.com/search?&q=what+is+3+lbs+in+kg+site%3A...

Blast Yahoo Answers back to hell by installing a Chrome extension called Google Search Filter: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-search-filt...

Add Experts-Exchange to the blacklist while you're at it.

Thanks for this! Firefox alternative: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/hide-unwanted...

Ah, nice! Only downside is that it doesn't support highlighting certain results. For example, Google Search Filter highlights Wikipedia and StackExchange results for, while removing cruft like Yahoo Answers.

I think Google has done a pretty good job at blacklisting Expert-sExchange. I don't remember the last time they turned up in my search results.

No, that needs to stay. Just so My Brother, My Brother and Me can continue answering them.

Incidentally, Yahoo Japan's version of Answers is quite useful and mostly troll-free.

It's free content, and they can sell ads on it. Personally, I'd love to own it.

And 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.

I've definitely found Yahoo Answers often useful. I'd argue Yahoo Answers is probably more helpful for the average person than Quora.

I've gotten useful info out of it.

Seriously, it's worse than the content farms they booted.

Similar experience, the few times I have used it, sadly.

Your problem is with Google, not Yahoo...

Let'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.

It 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.

Carl 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.

This Dilbert strip says it best http://dilbert.com/strip/2011-04-14.

CEOs of large companies at least. A big part is supposed to be long term strategy, but Mayer actually outsourced that bit to McKinsey:

http://recode.net/2015/11/09/yahoo-hires-mckinsey-to-mull-re...

She has not done better than flipping a coin would have done, it's a real shame that she has taken so much cash out of the business.

>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.

"wasn't able to capitalize on Alibaba shares"

I'm thinking they did pretty okay with Alibaba. They sold a chunk for a few billion, I think. They still own $23 billion of Alibaba.

That's some serious capital.

Taking a gamble on a turnaround CEO is in theory warranted when you have a situation like Yahoo back then (or now), and a "hundred million dollars+" is just the price you pay to get someone who just might have what it takes for a job where they'll both likely fail and have their career seriously curtailed.

There aren't many alternatives for a board of directors when just selling the company isn't much of an option.

A "turnaround CEO" with no CEO or turnaround experience is rich. She is a famous person and that's about the extent of her qualification for a $100m pay package.

Yeah, that's the first place where the "in theory" ran into the hard problems of practice.

On the other hand, in this narrow sub-domain of "high tech", how many turnaround experts are there? Worse, even with the "$100m pay package", how many of them, or just plain CEOs with some experience in with adversary, would be willing to take on the job? Maybe she was about the best they could get.

Hindsight is 20/20, but a boring finance type would have been a much better choice. With the huge Alibaba stake it was a dream position for an MBA type. A pet rock could have been CEO and the stock would have kept up fine because of the BABA shares.

Isn't it just a PR stunt? When she took over everyone was praising Yahoo and I'm sure investor confidence went up. Now that Yahoo is spiraling anyways it looks bad in retrospect, but if Yahoo had even managed to hold steady somewhat I think the hire would've been viewed as a total success.

"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.

>> The comments on those articles are always entertaining.

Agreed. Who the heck are those people who comment? Are these comments aggregated from somewhere?

Yep, 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..."

The name Mayer is not present in that article. That's definitely PR for the investors. Maybe to prepare a transition?

What 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.

*Meyer

It's Mayer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marissa_Mayer

A downvote for correcting an error? Why? EDIT: Ahh ... because the original was correct ...

I'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#{"custom...

I 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.

Hope they don't axe their fantasy offerings, I much prefer their site to the other options for my fantasy football.

That seems to be one of the few things going for them.

Guess I should pull down all my Flickr images and back them up.

To where? Don't forget all the metadata as well.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10703650

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10862663

If you only have one copy of something, you don't have a backup.. and you should always have a backup.

By 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.

A 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.

Oh, 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."

I love that the goodbye memo from Dan Tynan is an advertisement for his talented team. Classy.

I'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.

> 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.

yeah, it is a bit too black-and-white

Microsoft is doing great stuff with it in finance, ads, and MR is doing amazing stuff.

Lets not forget that they too shutdown part of their R&D department (Microsoft Research Silicon Valley) back in 2014.

I 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?

Half the world still has Yahoo mail accounts, for one.

They have a larger share of email accounts in the US than Google for starters...

Out of curiosity which companies are doing a better job than Flickr?

I happen to have a Yahoo email account.

"vertical" might be the douchiest corporate speak word I know of.

Copy/Compete; Yahoo is doing neither;

Will fantasy football get cut soon?

Yahoo! Sports is one of the verticals that is staying. I'd assume that fantasy sports is under that umbrella.

Staying where? With the holding company that has the Alibaba stock?

Better title: "Yahoo is shutting down about half of its content verticals"

Ok, we'll use that. Thanks.

It's from the article, but what is a "content vertical"?

Like a category site. Like NBA news, or a site focusing on security articles or home renovation.

Does 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".

"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.

Yahoo has digital magazines ?

Why would a search company have junk like that ?

How much other worthless baggage do they have ?

Yahoo 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-se...

Yahoo considers itself a "media" company. And therein lies the problem.

I 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.

That'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.

Ad space. They need to do something with their audience. They tried various content niches. Some failed, some didn't.

> 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...

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