• Adweek, Friday, December 1, 2006 11:15 AM

Yahoo is preparing to roll out what it calls "brand universes"-- dedicated areas of the portal where fans of a movie or product can congregate, share and connect with each other.

The brand universes are Yahoo's answer to the popularity of advertiser outposts on hot social-media sites. But unlike the brand areas on MySpace and YouTube, Yahoo is not asking marketers for ad dollars to build the sites. Instead, it has identified a batch of 100 "passion brands" to build dedicated areas.

In its first such area, Yahoo developed a destination for fans of Nintendo's Wii gaming system, wii.Yahoo.com, which includes uploaded Flickr photos, information from Yahoo Answers, user-contributed links from Del.icio.us and videos from Yahoo's video-sharing service. In the first 24 hours of operation, the site attracted 250,000 visitors.

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