The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is considered a great venue for launching new devices and services. As such, Yahoo! took the opportunity to unveil a new service that puts its focus on the heart of CES: technology.
Yahoo! Tech is a news portal that revolves around the tech industry. You can find anything from news on Bitcoin, new projects on Kickstarter, new shows on Netflix and a bunch of other material that people will likely be interested in.
What makes Yahoo Tech different from other news portals is that it looks more like a news reader – it’s more visual, in other words. When you visit the page, you’ll immediately notice that the news is represented by photos, and sometimes even GIFs. Images often make stories more interesting, and so props to Yahoo for going this route.
The site’s editorial director, Rafe Needleman, is a veteran journalist that Yahoo poached from note-making service Evernote.
Yahoo Tech looks really appealing, but what also makes it stand out from other online publications is the absence of display ads. Yes, you read that right, no display ads on Yahoo Tech. Most news portals plague their readers with banners, popups and streamer ads from the second they land on the site. It’s often irritating and sometimes downright annoying.
But why launch a tech vertical? Yahoo says that it’s a way of filtering out the noise from other tech news sites.
“People who buy most of the tech in the world are very smart but they are not enmeshed in this world, and they don’t care about staff changes and for the most part they are uninterested in Silicon Valley,” Needleman said. “They want to know what is the best TV to buy.”
Aside from Yahoo Tech, the company also introduced Yahoo! Food, a new digital magazine that is, you guessed it, dedicated to food. During her keynote, CEO Marissa Mayer stated that digital magazines is part of the company’s long-term efforts, which means we could be seeing various types of digital magazines being launched by Yahoo in the future. That is, if Yahoo Food gets a warm welcome from audiences. If you think about it, you can’t really go wrong with food, so Yahoo may have started out on the right foot with its digital magazine efforts.
Yahoo Food has the same layout as Yahoo Tech, featuring photos and GIFs. However, it has a lighter color theme which makes the food stand out more, and hopefully will leave reader’s drooling in anticipation.
Though Yahoo stated that there will be no display ads on Yahoo Tech and Food, there are sponsored posts, which means that’s where Yahoo will be raking in revenue.