According to Brand Week in the US, Yahoo! is rolling out “brand universes” for “passion brands” including Nintendo’s new Wii console.
The sites aggregate social media content from Yahoo! owned social media communities including del.icio.us and Flickr as well as hosting their own message boards and news.
Interestingly, Yahoo! is not charging the brands for the privilege - presumably it expects to make the money back on advertising.
The Wii site attracted 250,000 visitors in its first 24 hours, showing that the idea may have some longevity. Markets like video games are already extremely well served by fan sites and other dedicated social media communities, but Yahoo!’s massive audience may help it to grab a slice of the audience attention with this innovative approach.
