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Yahoo nabs social shopping site Polyvore to boost digital ad strategy

Polyvore's CEO promised the platform "will still be the same Polyvore that you love" while also briefly revealing new product features and perks are on the way.
Written by Rachel King, Contributor

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Yahoo might be taking some jabs and jibes for its "MaVeNS" digital advertising strategy (or at least for the quirky acronym), but the whole initiative could be getting a serious booster shot.

The search company made a surprise announcement on Friday afternoon that it is acquiring social shopping site Polyvore.

Founded in 2007 by a trio of former Yahoo engineers, Polyvore has blossomed into a rather beloved and tight knit online community, encouraging style creativity as well as fostering new connections between top retail brands and consumers.

Polycore CEO Jess Lee, who like Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is also a former Googler, promised in a blog post that the platform "will still be the same Polyvore that you love" while also briefly revealing new product features and perks are on the way.

Lee will now report to Yahoo's senior vice president of publisher products Simon Khalaf.

Polyvore could actually provide Yahoo with new resources, customers and (perhaps most importantly) focus for a number of its digital commerce and content initiatives.

In regards to the aforementioned Mavens (mobile, video, native, social) growth strategy, Yahoo noted in Friday's announcement that Polyvore will power native shopping ads intended to drive traffic and sales back to retailers. Polyvore will also reinforce Yahoo's native advertising platform, Gemini.

But with its dedicated community amassed over the years, Polyvore could also bring many more followers and content creators to Yahoo's growing list of dedicated content channels. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based corporation cited Yahoo Style and Yahoo Beauty as two examples.

"The combination of Yahoo's industry-leading digital content with Polyvore's expertise in community and commerce has outstanding potential," Khalaf wrote in prepared remarks.

Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed. Polyvore's team, based out of offices in San Francisco, New York and Mountain View, Calif., are all expected to join Yahoo.

The Polyvore deal wraps up a busy month for the Silicon Valley stalwart.

Although its last quarterly earnings report was a bit of a mixed bag, Wall Street took notice as Yahoo officially filed to establish the long-awaited spinoff from its multi-billion dollar Alibaba investment.

Dubbed Aabaco Holdings, Inc., the new publicly traded investment company previously known as SpinCo will incorporate all of Yahoo Small Business as well as 15 percent (roughly 384 million shares) of Alibaba Group.

Yahoo is shooting to complete the spinoff by the fourth quarter of 2015.

Image via Polyvore

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