Yahoo just announced Shine, and is hopping on the bandwagon that says women are a great target. Why now?

Just like iVillage, Glam and others, Yahoo knows that getting inventory in home, garden, health and other categories can translate into higher effective CPMs. They developed nine separate content areas and 38 sub-topics that appeal to visitors and advertisers.

What's Been Launched?

Yahoo has licensed decent article content for Shine, from major publishers who already cover this desired content in print and online. Then they hired both editors and bloggers to fill in the rest. There's no focus on video content yet.

Like any respectable Web 2.0 community, Yahoo also encourages contributions by visitors. If you have Yahoo email, then you automatically have access to your own blog. Of course, Yahoo also encourages you to buzz articles shown at Shine.

You can search content across Shine only, which should equate to site search on competitor sites. Given the sparse content so far, the results are fairly limited. So Yahoo isn't trying to create a vertical or women's search engine -- or directly respond to Ask.com, which recently claimed that position.

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