Great Online Resource for Kiwi Home Cooks

Leading NZ Portal Satisfies Appetites with the New Yahoo!Xtra Food, Serving up a Great Online Resource for Kiwi Home Cooks

AUCKLAND, June 19, 2009 – Yahoo!Xtra Ltd., New Zealand’s leading Internet portal, today launched Yahoo!Xtra Food, a comprehensive new addition to the website’s popular Lifestyle section. Building on Yahoo!Xtra’s longstanding relationship with Pacific Magazines, the new channel features thousands of favourite recipes from New Zealand’s most popular magazines, including New Idea, Better Homes and Gardens and Women’s Health.

Interactive elements enable visitors to actively participate – sharing successes, reviewing recipes and exchanging tips. “The features that we’re launching with are just the tip of the iceberg,” explains Alison Roigard, Yahoo!Xtra’s Head of Content and Alliances. “Yahoo!Xtra food will continue to evolve and we have plans for exciting enhancements in the months ahead. We’ve always had a strong demand from our audience for recipes, and there are opportunities for additional content providers to become involved too.

"We designed Yahoo!Xtra Food with New Zealand families and food lovers in mind," continues Alison. "Studies have shown that during recessions there is always a trend towards spending more time at home and ‘feathering the nest’. People refocus on the importance of sharing home-cooked meals with family and friends.” Data from Statistics New Zealand’s Retail Trade Survey backs this, as supermarket and grocery store sales volumes rose 1.9 percent in the last quarter, while values rose 3.3 percent, the greatest increase of all industry groups.

Yahoo!Xtra Food is the company's latest example of developing unique user experiences through the combination of social media tools and high-quality content that, in turn, creates additional marketing opportunities for advertisers. Sales Director Laura Maxwell-Hansen explains, “The great thing about Yahoo!Xtra Food is that it provides marketers, particularly in FMCG, with the means to communicate to a receptive audience through an integrated experience – an approach that has proven immensely popular in markets like the US and UK."

Satisfy your appetite for great recipes by pointing your browser to http://nz.yahoo.co.nz/food now.

About Yahoo!Xtra

Yahoo!Xtra is a joint venture between Telecom New Zealand Limited and Yahoo!7. Yahoo!Xtra combines world class mail and web search with the content New Zealanders care most about, making the site the ideal start point for Kiwi’s internet journeys.

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