Search Engines Try to Woo Female Users

Yahoo!'s Shine and Ask.com see women as a lucrative demographic.
By Pia Sarkar ,

SAN FRANCISCO -- Search providers

Yahoo!

(YHOO)

and Ask.com are courting women as if they had just discovered them online.

Last week, Yahoo! launched a new Web site called Shine in an effort to tap into its base of 40 million women between 25 and 45 who already visit Yahoo! each month.

In March, Ask.com, a division of

IAC/InterActive Corp.

(IAC) - Get Report

, said it will no longer try to compete with heavy hitters like

Google

(GOOG) - Get Report

and instead focus on its core demographic of predominantly women.

The financial incentive for either of the sites to do this is obvious. Yahoo! points out that women between 25 and 45 are a highly sought after demographic by advertisers because they are often the decision-makers when it comes to household purchases.

Women have long had a presence on the Internet, with the percentage of total users in the U.S. only a tad higher than men. According to Forrester Research, women made up 52% of Internet users in 2003. Today, they make up 51%.

So why are Yahoo! and Ask.com suddenly taking an interest in them?

Part of it might have to do with the potential to generate traffic at a time when the Internet is beginning to mature. According to research firm comScore, the total Internet audience in the U.S. in February grew by only 5% compared with the same period last year. But for women, that number was up by a substantial 43%.

Web sites catering to the female population have been around for a while -- the new challenge for anyone trying to break into this market is to create a unique enough experience to draw a large number of eyeballs.

Ask.com acknowledges that women make up the majority of its core following, representing more than 60% of its loyal users.

"We aren't necessarily creating niches -- those niches exist," says Nicholas Graham, a spokesman for Ask.com. "We have a realization that there are core audiences who already exist and what we need to do is super-serve them."

Graham says that Ask.com's female users tends to gravitate toward reference searches, like dictionaries and encyclopedias, as well as topics related to health and entertainment. Accordingly, the company plans to build up those categories and build out its search platforms to satisfy them.

Ask.com has long struggled to keep up with its competitors, capturing only 4.6% of total U.S. share of searches in February, according to research firm comScore. That compared to 59.2% for Google and 21.6% for Yahoo! in the same period.

Graham says Ask.com's new strategy is not meant to come at the cost of its other users. Instead, he described it as a "tip of the hat to women."

Likewise, Yahoo!'s Shine is meant to extract more value from its existing female demographic. The Web site contains content culled from magazines like

Glamour

,

Cosmopolitan

,

Bon Appétit

and

Good Housekeeping

. It will also publish original stories and select user blog posts to display prominently on the site.

"We're executing on Yahoo!'s starting point strategy by ensuring that women who start their day with Yahoo! are offered a more relevant experience," said Scott Moore, head of Yahoo! Media, in a statement. "Yahoo! Shine adds an important piece to our media portfolio, which already includes sites that are number one in the news, sports, finance and entertainment categories."

But Sarah Rotman Epps, an analyst for Forrester Research, says both Ask.com and Yahoo! will have to do more than just appeal to women, especially given all the other sites out there trying to do the same thing, including Glam Media, iVillage.com from NBC Universal, AOL Living and Everyday Health.

"You can't end there -- you have to go farther and deeper," Epps says.

She points to

The Knot

(KNOT)

as a site that has done a good job of establishing a loyal following among women who are about to get married. The forums on the site also create a sense of community. The Knot has further broadened its appeal by creating PromSpot.com and TheNest.com.

Epps adds that while women are nothing new to the Internet, companies must now establish a deeper connection with them.

"There is a trend toward trying to create destinations online where you have a very engaged audience," she says. "The more engaged, the more susceptible

you are to relevant advertisers."

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