Yahoo Wants Women Now

Yahoo just announced Shine, and is hopping on the bandwagon that says women are a great target. Why now?

Just like iVillage, Glam and others, Yahoo knows that getting inventory in home, garden, health and other categories can translate into higher effective CPMs. They developed nine separate content areas and 38 sub-topics that appeal to visitors and advertisers.

What’s Been Launched?

Yahoo has licensed decent article content for Shine, from major publishers who already cover this desired content in print and online. Then they hired both editors and bloggers to fill in the rest. There’s no focus on video content yet.

Like any respectable Web 2.0 community, Yahoo also encourages contributions by visitors. If you have Yahoo email, then you automatically have access to your own blog. Of course, Yahoo also encourages you to buzz articles shown at Shine.

You can search content across Shine only, which should equate to site search on competitor sites. Given the sparse content so far, the results are fairly limited. So Yahoo isn’t trying to create a vertical or women’s search engine — or directly respond to Ask.com, which recently claimed that position.

At launch, the ad inventory seems limited to Crest Whitestrip banners. Some text ads are also shown on article pages. I wonder if this ad mix will be replaced by higher effective CPM units, when Yahoo actively sells them later.

Will Shine Draw Traffic?

I’m not sure which women will be attracted to using Shine. Will visitors stumble here from Yahoo promotional efforts on their email and portal pages? Will visitors switch from other women’s sites, due to convenience?

Shine isn’t literally a destination, and the Shine domain happens to be an unrelated job site. Instead, this new offering is simply on Yahoo (shine.yahoo.com) and has various channels (shine.yahoo.com/channel/health) to draw more search traffic to the portal overall.

Yahoo is worth paying attention too — because they can access so many women already. It will be interesting to see how they do here, even if the offering feels a bit “me too” in the implementation.