Yahoo might be taking cues from obsessive fan blogs about specific brands: It has identified more than 100 properties that are the most popular, or fastest-growing, with its users and is building what it calls a “brand universe” site around each one, reports Variety. Set to launch throughout 2007, they will bring content from throughout Yahoo’s network into one destination for fans. Officially, the plan is called Yahoo’s “brand universe” plan, surely more about developing inventory for relevant advertising.
It hopes to partner with companies behind the properties it selects to obtain extra content and potentially send some traffic their way, but the “brand universe” pages won’t hinge on their cooperation, it said.
The first example is a mini-site for Wii, the Nintendo game console, here. This site includes articles from Yahoo Games, pictures from Flickr, purchase options from Yahoo Shopping, user questions and responses from Yahoo Answers and links to outside articles from Del.icio.us. The only thing it did not do: an actual blog.