Getting out in front of the increasing market for “green” products and services, Yahoo! Autos has launched a “Green Center.” The site profiles and rates/ranks hybrid and energy efficient cars. It also integrates Yahoo! Groups and other community content. Yahoo! worked with an organization called Environmental Defense to generate its ratings system.
Taking a design cue from Yahoo! Tech, the subdomain looks lots better (in my opinion) than the rest of Autos.
Green Center is smart for Yahoo! for several reasons, chief among which it will appeal to left-leaning affluent and younger users. It also differentiates the site from other competitors in the autos segment. There’s also a halo effect that Yahoo! generally will get in much the same way “cause marketing” creates a halo for the sponsoring companies.
The site has lots of interesting information, like cars that can run on biodiesel and locations of biodiesel fueling stations.
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And now for the bad headlines that will appear in the newspaper tomorrow: Yahoo! Looks for Green in New Autos ‘Green Center’
Of course there’s “Green Is the New Black.” And so on.
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Greg Sterling is the founding principal of Sterling Market Intelligence, a consulting and research firm focused on online consumer and advertiser behavior and the relationship between the Internet and traditional media, with an emphasis on the local marketplace.
