Yahoo Launches Shine, a Site for Women, Will Microsoft Deal Follow?
Yahoo today launched Shine, a vertical site that will cater to women in the much desired 25-54 age bracket, a group Yahoo believes has been underserved by them, in spite of the 40 million monthly visitors they receive from the demographic.
The site will feature original and syndicated content from the likes of Time Inc, Conde Nast, Hearst, and Rodale. There are nine categories that the site features, including Fashion and Beauty, Parenting, and Astrology.
Unlike some of Yahoo’s other efforts, the site has a very blog-like feel to it, and it looks very clean. The site also aggregates content from some of Yahoo’s other ventures, like Food, Health, Tech, and Green.
I’m seeing two display ads for Crest Whitestrips on the right side of the page, one near the top, and one down a little further in them middle. They go with two displays of the same ad, with nothing at the top and a sponsored link box about halfway down the page.
One interesting insight from Jason Calacanis is that Yahoo will now be directly competing with members of its own Yahoo Publisher Network. Although Yahoo has for a long while provided its own content (like with sports), this is another example of them infringing on the territory of sites that use their advertising network. Besides Knol, which would compete with ad-less Wikipedia, Google can make the argument to publishers that only they can be trusted not to create content that will potentially drain revenue from their ad network clients.
In other news, there are rumor circulating that the deal between Yahoo and Microsoft may be finalized sometime in the next week or so. There’s nothing concrete about this, just a few rumors swirling around certain blogs. Unless you’re living under a rock, you’ll know immediately when this does in fact occur.
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