Mama Yahoo! Brings Home the Bacon
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Written By Kate Zimmermann | November 2, 2006 | Share This
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Yahoo! came out with two new services today targeted at the Martha Stewart mamas - Yahoo! Food and Yahoo! Green Center. The first is a site full of recipes, celebrity food advice and restaurant reviews. The latter is a special section of their Auto pages devoted to eco-friendly vehicles. Bloomberg reports that Yahoo! is considering future sites for home decorating and fashion, and today Yahoo announced future plans for a massive dating site for “spiritual singles”. The site, called Soulmatch, is the result of a partnership between Beliefnet, a new-york based dating site, and Yahoo Personals.
These, plus Yahoo! Tech, make up a new “lifestlyles” series that Yahoo! is unrolling over the next year to attract a larger female audience. Each of the vertical sites features a set of bloggers who speak to a certain character - the Mom, the “Techie Diva”, the “Hungry Girl” (aka: woman on a diet). Furthermore, Yahoo’s new UI design features a number of usability improvements that make services more obvious, more social and more like… something your mom would use. Bloggers are called “advisors”, popular tags run in highly visible areas, and tech services like RSS are consolidated into everyday-use email. Yodel Anecdotal (a Yahoo! blog), in fact, just featured a story about how to shop through RSS. Yahoo!, it appears, is undergoing a site-wide usability update to make its uber-tech services less intimidating for the soccer mom audience.
With shares down 34%, the femme-positioning is likely a dig for ad revenue. The new services and re-design are highly receptive to a commercial audience, which (theoretically) will attract women who like to shop. When you consider that Yahoo gets 1.5 million food-related searches every day, it’s no wonder big names such as Martha Stewart, Kraft, and Food & Wine jumped on the opportunity to be premier Y!Food advertisers. Today Forbes reports, “Consumer packaged goods companies are expected to spend $900 million in advertising in 2007.” As the only major engine to offer a vertical food search, Yahoo! will likely draw most of that traffic and advertising revenue.
The real question is whether Yahoo! will take advantage of the higher-converting traffic that is generated by their vertical mini-sites. If Yahoo! were to allow marketers to pay a premium to advertise exclusively in vertical search pages (like the publisher network, but based on an auction system), Yahoo! could make a serious amount of ca$h money. That, plus the Panama update, could be the edge that pulls yahoo out of a year-long slump.
Topics: ECommerce, SEM: Paid Search, Yahoo! |