Shine: Yahoo Unveils Content Portal For Women

Food, Fashion. Parenting, & Love

[martinibuster]

Move over iVillage? Yahoo unwraps a content-portal targeting women, a step away from sales niches (travel, finance, autos) and concentrating on a social demographic.

According to SFGate [sfgate.com]:

Shine will feature a stable of editors who will comment on a variety of topics of interest to women and link to articles from magazines and content from other Yahoo properties. Count on seeing headlines like "Shazam! Matt Damon, hot daddy" and "Are your diet foods making you fat?"

They intend to fold user generated content into the portal, as well as their standalone food and astrology areas. Marriage and birthing are perennial topics but right now you have to scroll down a bit to get to those. The content above the fold is currently dominated by celebrity fluff. Should SHINE.YAHOO.COM focus on content that women find useful or should they worry about how to help women kill a few minutes?

Constructive criticism
One thing that bothers me is they're sticking to their subdomain branding strategy by making the URL shine.yahoo.com. AOL had success with TMZ.com, proving that good content can stand on it's own domain. My personal opinion is that Yahoo would be better off to drop the subdomain branding and let it's good content fend for itself without the baggage of having to type or code a subdomain, to allow their properties to stand on their own domain-feet.

Imo, keeping their efforts under a subdomain is like making their kid walk to school and back with grandma. Not only is it uncool and embarassing but to me it undermines the status of the site as a destination. Let it go. Trust your content.

[Habtom]

I kind of like the idea of letting it stand on its own.

But why the rush now to accomodate women targeted content. Remember the recent ask discussion:
Ask Abandons Search - Becomes a Women's Vertical [webmasterworld.com]

[maximillianos]

My guess is they are chasing Ask's idea... figuring they must have done some extensive research to make such a drastic change in direction...

[martinibuster]

Ask beat Yahoo in announcing a new direction, then back pedaled. As of today it's vaporware. Shine is the real thing.

Any predictions?

Anybody view Shine as a channel for promoting their sites?

[maximillianos]

Seems like they hired a bunch of college writers, and integrated some RSS feeds. Pretty much the same type of "social network" for women that PopSugar created years ago...

But Yahoo has the clout to take some of their traffic and followers if they keep it fresh and updated... Time will tell...

[ebound]

I thought I was on the NYT.

[matimer]

I assumed that the only people that use yahoo for search are old women who don't work in a corporate environment and don't know that google is better... they just want to product there niche

[martinibuster]

Can Yahoo win the race with aggregated content?

From an article in CRN [crn.com]:

The new Website will feature nine categories "ranging from Fashion & Beauty to Parenting, and will feature content from many of the most popular lifestyles publishers, including Conde Nast Publications and Hearst Corporation."

How many sites doing the same thing get whacked by Yahoo's quality team?

Would Yahoo's effort have a better chance if they hired engaging writers to produce original content?

[ember]

How best to target women? Content about babies? Diets? Celebrities? How about information about women-owned businesses, health care for women, things that actually matter? Gender-stereotyping is really getting old.