Date: Monday, March 31, 2008
Yahoo Launch New Site for Women
In an attempt to rebuild their struggling business, Yahoo has launched Shine. Shine is explicitly targeted to women aged 25 - 54, making it the search engine giant’s first demographic specific site. However, the company does have a number of specific sites on subjects such as finance and sport, which draw a specialist audience.
The launch of Shine is part of Yahoo’s strategy to launch a network of themed sites in order to appeal to their widest possible audience. The company started to implement this in May 2006 by launching Yahoo Tech, and in November 2006, they did it again by launching another specialist site, Yahoo Food. So far, their strategy seems to be working pretty well; according to market research by Hitwise, Yahoo Tech is now in the top five US technology media sites and Yahoo Food ranks in the top 10 food lifestyle sites.
Shine’s distinct demographic is expected to become a big hit with advertisers, particularly those in the retail, pharmaceutical and consumer-packaged goods sectors. Attracting new advertisers would be a great draw for Yahoo, as the company has recently seen a significant slump in advertising revenue.
Shine will offer a vast range of content, some of which will be syndicated from popular lifestyle publishers such as the Hearst Corporation, which currently publishes Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, Redbook and a number of other ladies magazines.
Yahoo has also hired an editorial team who will choose the blog posts that are featured on the site, as well as writing original content on a daily basis. The editors will also have to seek out interesting articles from Yahoo in general, and then ensure that they are featured on the Shine site. Shine will have a blog-like form to encourage participation; it will feature the newest articles on the top of the page and some commentary from the editors.
Shine will have a diverse range of content to reflect the busy nature of women’s lives. Some of the featured categories will be parenting, beauty, sex and love, healthy living, career and money, entertainment, fashion, food, astrology, and home life.
Amy Lorio, Yahoo Lifestyles vice president, explains that Shine was created to offer women a one-stop shop of thought-provoking content and communication tools. She said that the company decided to create the site in this way after conducting intensive internal research, which found “women were sort of caretakers for everybody in their lives. They didn't feel like there was a place that was looking at the whole them — as a parent, as a spouse, as a daughter. They were looking for one place that gave them everything.”
By launching Shine, Yahoo is entering an already-thriving market that already features major companies such as iVillage, which is a unit of NBC Universal.
Source:
Associated Press
Reuters
This article is the intellectual property of Pan European Consulting Limited and any unauthorised reprinting or publishing on other websites is an infringement of copyright.