Yahoo! Shine

» see shine.yahoo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Yahoo launched Shine on 31 March 2008, and it was explicit about who it was for: American women between 25 and 54. Not a magazine, not a community, a portal vertical. Food, parenting, health, relationships, horoscopes, the kind of thing a very large number of people read every morning without ever describing themselves as readers of it. NBC News covered the launch under the headline that a new Yahoo site would shine on women.

This is as far from my corner of the internet as a product can get and still be on the same internet. I was 24 in 2008 and in Turkey, and Shine was built for a demographic and a country I had nothing to do with. The reason it belongs in a graveyard anyway is scale. Portal verticals like this one were how most of the world's non-technical internet users actually spent their time online for about a decade, and almost none of that era left a monument.

Shine ran for six years and then Marissa Mayer closed it.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

Shine's whole logic was Yahoo's logic. The company had enormous front-door traffic and the job of each vertical was to catch some of it and hold on. You arrived from the Yahoo homepage, or from Yahoo Mail, or from a search, and you landed on a story about school lunches with a photo and a slideshow and twelve more stories below it. Nobody typed shine.yahoo.com into a browser. They did not have to.

That worked until it was the thing being held against the site. When the press started reporting Shine's closure in April 2014, the complaint quoted back from inside Yahoo was that Shine was mass-market, more like USA Today than a glossy, and that the CEO wanted an online Vogue. Being read by millions of ordinary people had become the charge rather than the defense.

~ the cull ~

The formal announcement came on 7 July 2014, and Shine was one name on a list. Yahoo Voices, the old Associated Content, went on the same day, 31 July. The Contributor Network that fed it was given until the end of August. Yahoo People Search was killed effective immediately. Newlook and bookmarks.yahoo.com had already quietly gone. It was a clear-out, and Shine was the biggest thing in the bin.

What replaced it was a set of digital magazines, Yahoo Beauty and Yahoo Travel among them, each covering a slice of what Shine had covered and each pitched upmarket. They did not last either. Today shine.yahoo.com still resolves, and what it does is redirect you to a tag page for health inside Yahoo Beauty, so the address of a site built for every American woman between 25 and 54 now forwards to a filtered list on a brand that was itself wound down.

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