Yahoo Looks To 'Brand Universe' Game-Themed Web Portals

Online portal and search engine company Yahoo has chosen Nintendo's Wii to launch its new “Brand Universe” ad strategy, with Nintendo’s console the first of a planned one hundred new branded entertainment and community websites. The Wii website is already live at wii.yahoo.com and features news stories, blogs and message boards, with information culled from Yahoo’s own Web pages and other Internet sources - specifically using Flickr, Delicious, Yahoo! Answers, Yahoo! Avatars, Yahoo! Videos, and some Yahoo! Games content related to Nintendo's new console. As a test case, the Wii portal was launched last autumn with a purposeful lack of advertising and attracted 1.2 million visitors in November, according to Yahoo’s figures. Other video game brands now scheduled to receive the same treatment include The Sims and Halo, with other media brands including Lost, The Office, Harry Potter and Transformers also planned. Other brands are expected to be revealed by the end of the month. Unusually, Yahoo has indicated that the company "plans to share traffic and behavioral data with the featured companies and celebrities in an effort to please potential advertisers", according to an AP report about the sites. "We are totally open to driving a result that makes a partner want to work with us," said Yahoo executive Vince Broady to the Associated Press.