Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

"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."

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com