NO DOUBT TIRED OF being relentlessly pursued by the Vole, Yahoo has decided to do a bit of its own chasing. Skirt chasing that is. Today Yahoo is launching its latest new Web site, called “Shine”, aimed squarely at women.

Shine now joins a whole host of other Yahoo spawned sites including Yahoo news, finance, sports, entertainment, tech and even the unpopular green. But Shine is Yahoo’s first go at targeting a specific demographic audience rather than just a topic of potential interest. Well, you can’t really go wrong when you’re targeting just over 50% of the world’s population. Or can you?

Yahoo claims that Shine will not aim to tap into the stereotypes nauseatingly used by marketers and advertisers to decide what content women should be interested in, and claims that it doesn’t “want to be a site just for moms or just for single women or working women, or any specific demo- or psychographic” (psychographic? Are they calling us insane now?).

Instead, Yahoo reckons that Shine will be more appealing to the new breed of tech savvy women who, according to CNET, tend to bog even more than men do. Also, according to CNET’s girly stats, about 40 million women aged between 25 and 54 log into Yahoo every month, making them a worthwhile market to tap.

Shine seems to be aiming at becoming the top destination site in the Yahoo lifestyles category, and supposedly will try very hard not to drag in it’s female punters by the hair with thigh (sorry, eye) grabbing headlines like “how to lose that winter flab for that perfect bikini body”. To try to ensure that this doesn’t happen, the site’s management team is entirely female, but that still hasn’t stopped them from admitting that they’ve been referring to women as 'chief household officers', or that the site will have full integration with Yahoo Food, Health, and Astrology - the three subjects closest to women’s hearts apparently [What about chocolate - Ed].

Also, Shine’s idea of reaching out to the new breed of totally-non stereotypical women involves insightful articles and blogs hailing from such non stereotypical sites as Women's Health, Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan, InStyle, Style.com and cooking site Epicurious. Strange, but there’s not a tech site among them.

Shine appears to be a shallow façade of a site, pretending to offer women something new, when it obviously doesn’t. At least other women orientated sites like CafeMom and Glam don’t try to hide their real motives under layers of this season’s hottest pastel lip shades and blemish hiding foundation cream. µ

L’Inq
CNET

Shine