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Yahoo Courting Sponsors for Social Media Sites

Yahoo is beginning to increase efforts to monetize its social media sites, including Yahoo Groups, Yahoo 360 and Yahoo Video.

This week, Yahoo will begin a high-profile marketing initiative with Nissan Motors, after having recently launched its first corporate page on Yahoo 360 for Travelocity, MediaPost reports (via MarketingVox). Yahoo promises that similar marketing efforts will be coming soon to Yahoo 360, Yahoo Groups and Yahoo Video.

Still, the company understands the importance of pushing too much advertising too soon on its growing communities and is being reserved in its monetization approach, especially toward Yahoo 360, which is still in the testing phase and just began accepting advertisements in August.

Yahoo’s sales pitch to marketers has focused on its ability to offer a network of social media sites rather than a single site, such as rivals MySpace or Facebook. The advantage is that Yahoo can track visitors’ habits and how they interact with integrated campaigns, providing valuable feedback to advertisers.

But David Kopp, senior director of product management for community applications at Yahoo, admits that the networked approach won’t work for everyone: “Our social media offering is so broad and has so many components that we don’t put all our attention on one product experience, and I think we probably suffer for that.”