Ars Technica, Battelle’s Searchblog, TechCrunch, GigaOm, and Techdirt have all weighed in on Yahoo’s “brand universes” — a topic that I touched on back in November as The Internet called: it wants its pageviews back.
Oth…

We are already doing this for our clients like West Surfing: http://westsurfing.com

essentially this is a search portal within a distributed set of search engines run by one company….

wait till the ‘lost’ or ‘24′ brands start up…

it’ll work

Are they just trying to take advantage of their page rank? I imagine that a search for “wii” would yield “wii.yahoo.com” very high in the results simply because of the yahoo.com domain.

This announcement addresses some of my points, in that they are actually tying together various disjointed and haphazard properties around a particular brand, and creating an integrated experience.

I like it.

The idea of a “brand universe” is not exactly compelling to me. I want to create my own universe on the web, built around my preferences and my social networks. The brands need to find authentic ways of fitting into that.

Due to the dynamic nature of the page I wasn’t able to find the links back to my blog, but it indicates that these pages (at least the Wii one) are doing some pageviews.

No, not mistaken in the slightest.

1) Yahoo *is* in the Search game. Whether or not they match up to Google (they don’t) isn’t the point in question here.

2) Your point re: adoption of things like Del.icio.us by “middle America”. Sure, I’ll admit that these tech memes don’t have as much relevance in Kansas City as in Daly City, but again – *not. the. point.* The point is about aggregation of what they DO have. I’d say that under this strategy, more people (including those in KC) will be exposed to Del.icio.us than might have otherwise ever stumbled upon it. Will they take it up? I dunno – irrelevant. Not the point. Will Y! monetize that “stumble” traffic? abso-friggin-lutely.

3) MY premise is born out by facts. What people *search* for. Take a look at any of Y!’s “hot list” features like the Buzz Index – that’s what will flag for Y! what is worth building a BBP or not. And don’t get hung up on “Star Trek” as the example brand – THINK… it could be Lost, or American Idol, or any relevant brand that has context beyond just a simple TV or IMDB listing.

@rodrigo – your last point is right on target. The challenge will be for Y! to wean themselves off the easy money from Run-of-network ads like the Vonage one you point out… and get more contextually relevant ones in there.

The news that Yahoo! is creating mini-sites or mini-portals is worth commenting a bit on. Here’s their site for the Wii. Basically one complaint I’ve had about Yahoo! is that although I use Yahoo! Finance daily, have a Yahoo! SBC account, …

good lord.

Half the people here think it’s junk, the other half think it’s very smart.
I also think that is makes a lot of sense once you look at it as a highly customized search landing page.

The main challenge is execution: its already late enough in the game that for a new Wii community site to gain traction is going to be hard. They needed to launch this in November. If they can get these sites set up prior to a product launch (for the Wii or a Zune) then they stand a chance of actually becoming a relevant destination for any given product and they are creating real value off of some negligible variable costs for yet another new site.

Right now the ad targeting is not good, however. I can’t imagine Google ever putting a Vonage ad based on a query for Wii (though the Vonage ad is now appearing on the wii.yahoo.com homepage). If they can clean up their execution this could do well.