Yahoo likes the ladies -- or it thinks it can profit off them, anyway. The company rolled out a women's site today called "Shine," which will cover parenting, sex and love, healthy living, food, career and money, entertainment, fashion, beauty, home life and astrology -- pretty much everything we hate about women's magazines.
So what does Yahoo hope to gain by owning so much content? The company already generates thousands of pages of original content, and so far, it hasn't been able to monetize its traffic as effectively as Google.
"It's really, really, really difficult to win the content game," says Jon Gibs, an analyst with Nielsen Online. "The one place where Yahoo has been really successful [in content] is in sports, but that wasn't really because of its content -- it was because Yahoo offered free fantasy sports, a piece of functionality, that wasn't really free at the time."
For "Shine," Yahoo enlisted the efforts of Brandon Holley -- former editor of Jane magazine and Elle Girl (both print editions have folded). And while the site is probably in decent hands, a couple of the central figures in Yahoo's media group have left: Neil Budde, founding editor of Wall Street Journal online, got the boot in December 2007; and Lloyd Braun, former ABC exec, got the ax in December 2006.
Interestingly, Yahoo's bigger competitor -- Google -- has consistently said that it has no interest in producing original content.
"One of the things I think there is often a lot of misunderstanding about is just what are our intentions," David Eun, Google's vice president of content partnerships, recently said. "Chief among them is this idea that somehow we're going to morph into a media company meaning we will produce and own our own content and that is absolutely not the case for us. Having come from a traditional media world I can say how different the skill sets and the culture has to be to do that."
Trip Chowdhry, an analyst with Global Equities Research, argues that Google's loss is Yahoo's gain.
"A company doesn't become successful by imitating others -- they become successful by differentiating themselves. Yahoo is strong in content and weak in search. From a strategic perspective, I think they should be bolstering their content offerings," Chowdhry says.
Photo: Flickr/ZMB
