Yahoo just launched Brand Universe. Brand Universe is a Yahoo sub-domain website dedicated to a brand or assimilated with an aggregation of content from various Yahoo properties like delicious, Flickr …etc.
"Yahoo has already built a Brand Universe site around the Nintendo Wii,
and on Tuesday it announced six more, which will be centered on Harry
Potter; the video games Halo and the Sims; the television shows “The
Office” and “Lost”; and Transformers, the toy line, television show,
comic books and coming movies." NYT article
Techrunch as an article about it but the discussion as often is more interesting than the article. As Farhad puts it in the comment 32 :
Half the people here think it’s junk, the other half think it’s very smart.
it’s GREAT because –> it’s a one stop shop
it’s BAD because –> It’s a kind of spam using Yahoo power and it’s not attractive for user because it’s not relevant and for ads because it’s over branded
The best argument to defend the idea comes from Thom kozik in comment 20, the best attacks comes from comments 19 and 40.
Yahoo is clearly following the 3C rule : Content, Community, and Commerce but I think they miss the Google Rule : offer relevancy and make user life easier (and maybe faster).
The comment I enjoyed the most in the Techcrunch discussion is number 38 from Micki Krimmel
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.
I’ve said it before, I think Yahoo kicks Ass but on that one it’s not smart enough ! Don’t get me wrong, It will surely work but probably without delivering the best Internet ROI ever. Nevertheless I think it’s a pretty good example of what we try to achieve with U.[lik].
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