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.
