Yahoo acquires social shopping site Polyvore

Yahoo has picked up another company, a social shopping site this time.

Yahoo announced late yesterday that it had agreed to the acquisition of Polyvore for an undisclosed price.

The company, founded in 2007 by three former Yahoo engineers, had emerged as a type of digital corkboard for picking and sharing clothing ensembles. Pinterest, which was founded three years later, finally overshadowed the company.

It also competed with Wanelo, another fashion focused social curation site.

In contrast to Pinterest, Polyvore allows every item to be purchased from a retailer by clicking on a link in the description. The company makes money by selling ads to 350 brands and retailers, which can sponsor collections or items on the site.

With the acquisition, Yahoo gets a foothold in e-commerce, an area that had attracted investment from not just Pinterest, but also much bigger services like Facebook, Instagram and Google. Polyvore's ads, which blended with other content on its app, fitted into Yahoo's strategy of moving more into so-called native advertising.

''Every time we've seen an engaged community, we've seen magical things happen,'' said Simon Khalaf, Yahoo's senior vice president for publisher products, in an interview, The New York Times reported.

''This is exactly what we see in Polyvore. Their content is actionable. We were very attracted to this model.''

Without disclosing the terms of the deal Yahoo said Polyvore would accelerate its 'Mavens' growth strategy.

Yahoo has been focusing on four areas - mobile, video, native advertising and social - which it called Mavens, to drive user engagement and ad sales as it battled stiff competition from Google Inc and Facebook Inc.

Revenue from Mavens accounted for one-third of the company's total revenue in the quarter ended 30 June.

The Mavens portfolio included BrightRoll, mobile app network Flurry, mobile ad buying platform Yahoo Gemini as also blogging site Tumblr.