Yahoo! Inc., in an effort to boost advertising sales by offering more unique content, introduced a food Web site with recipes and videos of celebrity chefs including Martha Stewart and Wolfgang Puck.
The site, Yahoo Food, lets users share and rate recipes online, Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo said in a statement.
The site opened to Internet users today.
Yahoo has signed up advertisers including Kraft Foods Inc.
and Sheraton Hotels & Resorts to support the site, which is targeted primarily at women. It’s part of a push by Lloyd Braun, head of Yahoo’s media group and a former ABC television executive, to create more unique sites on which Yahoo can sell ads. The company added a site for technology reviews in May.
“It’s an underserved audience,” Scott Moore, head of news and information at Yahoo, said in an interview. Yahoo also may develop sites on home decorating and fashion, he said.
Yahoo sought to combine information from third parties as well as originally produced material for the site, Moore said.
Yahoo Food will include video produced by Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Inc. and recipes from Allrecipes.com, as well as postings from 13 Web log writers, or bloggers. The company also will produce an original video show called “Cheap and Easy.” “It’s the right strategy,” said David Card, an analyst with JupiterResearch in New York. “I don’t think it would make sense for them to spend a lot of money producing original content.” Stock Slump Shares of Yahoo rose 4 cents to $26.03 at 10:09 a.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market composite trading. Before today, they had fallen 34 percent this year after second- and third-quarter results disappointed investors.
Yahoo’s tech reviews site, which competes with San Francisco-based Cnet Networks Inc., had 1.94 million U.S.
visitors in September, according to research firm ComScore Networks Inc. That trailed the 2.47 million visitors to Cnet’s tech reviews site.
In September of last year, Yahoo hired war correspondent Kevin Sites to write a Web log, or blog, about armed conflicts around the world. Moore said the company plans to release a new version of the blog focused on the U.S. Yahoo canceled an adventure travel site released a year ago because it was difficult to promote, he said.
