Yahoo! scales vertical wall?
PaidContent.org reports on the launch of Yahoo!'s Industry Center pages, which aggregate a view of the ten leading companies in an industry, calling the service a precursor to "perhaps the holy grail for business sites." I respectfully disagree, in that these are building blocks, but not precursors to a premium service. By that, I mean that a single industry vertical service is inadequate, but you can create real value by organizing a comprehensive view of various markets (not just the top 10 companies), reaching further to create integrated access to deep information from a variety of sources -- many that either don't exist or are so expensive today that only specialists use them.
I wouldn't look for a "Medical Devices Industry" vertical that people subscribe to, but for a "Deep Research" service that you might enter through any number of industry vertical pages and pay for more information as you need it. For example, you may not need a year's subscription to a "Medical Devices Industry" vertical service when doing research on a company in which you are considering an investment, but you'll pay for the data when you need it if the site is organized to lead you to what you need before giving up in frustration.
I'm probably splitting hairs by differentiating between "precursor" and "building block," but the point is that there won't be a lot of little Yahoo! but a deeper broader Yahoo! built on these vertical services.
Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe at October 29, 2002 04:22 PM | TrackBack