Which taxonomy should you use to classify news content, IAB-QAG or IPTC Subject Codes?

With the vast quantities of news content available online about every topic, it can be a challenge to source content about what you are interested in without getting a lot of noise as well. To help people find the topics they are interested in, publishers organize content into taxonomies. For example, you can see in the navigation bar above that the taxonomy of this blog, which consists of the categories "General," "Product," "Data Science," and "Research". But if you're building a solution that searches for news content from more than one source, you quickly run into a big problem: every publisher categorizes their content according to their own taxonomy. For instance, stories about the same event might be categorized as "Business" in the New York Times but about "Stocks & Shares" on another website. This is where the AYLIEN News API's classification feature helps you. Every month, it gathers millions of stories and categorizes every one of them by two taxonomies - IAB-QAG and IPTC Subject Codes. These taxonomies consist of hundreds of categories, so whatever topic you're interested in, broad or niche, you can easily source all of the content you need, and none of what you don't.

Here's an important point about the taxonomies that most people don't realise: each of them is designed for a different industry, so each has advantages for different use cases. But when we’re talking with our users on our support channels, we notice that people often don't use the taxonomy that is best for their use case. So we thought we’d put a couple of tips into a short blog to help you decide which taxonomy you should use to maximize the value of whatever you're building. We’re going to outline:

1. The difference between IAB-QAG and IPTC Subject Codes.
2. How IAB-QAG organizes content
3. How IPTC Subject Codes organizes content.

What’s the difference between IAB-QAG and IPTC Subject Codes?

If you’re trying to decide which of these categories will allow you to access the content that’s valuable to you, here is a good thing to remember: IAB-QAG was designed for online advertising, whereas IPTC Subject Codes was designed to standardize all news content classification. As a result of this, you’ll see that IAB-QAG focuses on products and services, whereas IPTC focuses on a broader range of topics, making it more useful for business intelligence. For example, take a topic that our News API gathers tens of thousands of new stories about every month - health. Subcategories of the advertising-focused IAB-QAG health category are made up of subcategories where advertisers can place ads for in-demand products or services (Herbs for Health, Senior Health, Dermatology). On the other hand, the IPTC Health category is less than half the size and organizes content into categories more useful to a researcher (Healthcare Policy, Medical Research, Health Organisations).

Use IAB-QAG to categorize content in a commercially-oriented way

So IAB-QAG is designed to classify content to maximize the value of online ads by categorizing content in a way that allows relevant products or services to be advertised. We just saw that in the health categories of each taxonomy, this affects the type of details that each taxonomy recognizes, but it also affects how much coverage some subjects receive. For an extreme picture of how different the focus of each is, let’s look at how each taxonomy covers content about cars. Content about cars is arguably product-driven by its nature, so you can see how IAB-QAG categorizes this content with far more attention to detail, whereas IPTC has one automotive category. So if you’re classifying content about topics that are product-oriented (such as automotive topics) you may want to consider using IAB-QAG, even if your aim is not to drive revenue with semantic advertising.

Use IPTC to categorize content for media monitoring and market intelligence

So we just saw that IAB-QAG is designed with online advertising in mind and organizes content into a taxonomy that focuses on products and services. In both of these examples IAB-QAG covered the subject matter with either a wider range of possible categories, or a more product-focused list of categories. But the IPTC taxonomy is extremely useful too. It covers subjects that are important to the business world in far greater detail. For example, you can use our searchable taxonomies in our docs to take a look through the monster 132-subcategory long economy, business and finance category, and compare it to the 12-subcategory long IAB-QAG Business category.

This detailed focus on business content allows IPTC users to dig into quite granular topics that matter to business intelligence. Some of the categories that the News API classifies about this topic are so granular it’s fascinating. You can take a look at through each of these taxonomies in detail in our docs.

So that’s a brief overview to help you decide which taxonomy is useful to you. With a combined 900+ potential categories recognized by the News API across both taxonomies, you will definitely find some categories that you can use to source news or analyze trends that matter to you. Check out the full list of categories for IPTC or IAB-QAG, and if you want to retrieve some stories, click on the image below to grab your API key and make your first News API query within a couple of minutes!