Social commerce site Polyvore was purchased by Yahoo back in September for $230 million as part of Marissa Mayer's "MaVeNS," strategy to acquire more mobile, video, native and social assets. The site acts as a visual search engine for fashion products. They generate revenue through advertising real estate and affiliate fees providing Yahoo with another platform on which to leverage their advertising network.At present the company has around 9 million unique visitors per month, significantly below Pinterest's 76 million monthly visitors. The company plans to grow the user base through increased engagement with the fashion community, presumably through partnerships and/or influencers. For Polyvore, the ability to leverage the Yahoo name in order to establish valuable partnerships should accelerate growth but with Pinterest as the ubiquitous visual fashion discovery site it's unclear how Polyvore will ever catch up or compete. Pinterest's recent introduction of "Buy" buttons gives it yet another advantage as users can buy items directly through the site, a function Polyvore has been unable to add for technological reasons. After 8 years of operations Polyvore still has a major uphill battle to fight in the social commerce game. It will be interesting to see if Yahoo is able to monetize the ad real estate enough for the acquisition to have any positive returns.
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