By Josh Beckerman 

Yahoo Inc. agreed to buy social shopping site Polyvore Inc., a move intended to enhance the portal's "Mavens" growth strategy.

Terms of the deal weren't disclosed Friday. Venture-backed Polyvore--geared toward fashion, beauty and home décor--announced a $14 million Series C funding round in 2012. The company's investors include DAG Ventures, Benchmark Capital and Matrix Partners.

The purchase is expected to help Yahoo's native-advertising efforts due to Polyvore's relationships with more than 350 retailers.

"Polyvore will strengthen Yahoo's digital magazines and verticals through the incorporation of community and commerce," Yahoo said.

Earlier this year, Yahoo unveiled a new financial metric tracking revenue in its four key areas of growth: mobile, video, native and social, or MaVeNS.

The idea was to focus investors' attention on the areas of the company that are growing, while diverting their focus from its shrinking desktop display and search ads.

Polyvore Chief Executive Jess Lee will join Yahoo, reporting directly to Simon Khalaf, senior vice president of product and engineering.

According to a Polyvore blog post, the company "started out in 2007 as the brainchild of 3 ex-Yahoo engineers, Jianing Hu, Guangwei Yuan and Pasha Sadri." Ms. Lee, a former Google Inc. product manager, wrote that she "was an early Polyvore user who wrote in with compliments and complaints, got hired as the first product manager, and eventually became CEO."

Polyvore has offices in Mountain View, Calif., San Francisco and New York, and has more than 20 million monthly users.

Yahoo said July 21 that its second-quarter revenue rose 15% to $1.24 billion, its highest quarterly revenue increase in almost nine years.

But the cost of acquiring traffic jumped sharply to $200.2 million from $43.8 million in the year-earlier period as Yahoo began paying partners including Mozilla Corp. and Oracle Corp. more money for users. Excluding traffic costs, revenue was nearly flat in the second quarter.

Those costs are adding up as Chief Executive Marissa Mayer bets heavily on areas including mobile, search and video ads. To funnel millions of users into its search engine, Yahoo has struck deals to pay a portion of its revenue from each search to partners such as Mozilla.

Revenue from "Mavens" grew 60% to $399 million in the quarter.

Douglas MacMillan contributed to this article.

Write to Josh Beckerman at josh.beckerman@wsj.com

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