Yahoo News has launched a daily 90-second Web series featuring the most-clicked stories of the day on the basis of its popularity, in association with Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A. and production house Reveille, MediaWeek reported yesterday.

The launch of the series, called "Who Knew?," follows the recent hiring of journalists and reporters from prestigious media agencies to the Yahoo news development team for creation of original content. The Web series is produced in collaboration with Reveille, and is being produced by the Elisabeth Murdoch-owned TV production house that also recently produced a show for Yahoo Shine as a part of the "content production and distribution agreement," paidContent reported.

The newly launched web series brings together "Yahoo!'s scale and understanding of its audience, Toyota's understanding of its Avalon customer, and Reveille's creative insights and proven production expertise," the press release posted on MarketWatch stated. The series is collaboratively developed for the launch of the redesigned Toyota Avalon, which will comprise of several branding elements on the page, one "comforting fact" within the programme and the Avalon campaign theme.

Having tasted success with short mass appeal shows like "Prime time in No Time," which recaps the best of TV, and Yahoo Shine's fashion-themed "The Thread," the "Who Knew?" campaign follows as a part of Yahoo's continued expansion into branded original entertainment content initiatives, according to a statement in MediaWeek.

The campaign sponsored by Toyota will be executed by Yahoo with a customised homepage ad on April 14 and the Yahoo News homepage ad later on in May.

"Creative, original programming such as WHO KNEW? is an essential part of Yahoo!'s mission to be the centre of people's online lives," Mark Walker, vice president of Yahoo News stated in the press release. "WHO KNEW? will inform and entertain the Internet's largest news audience with equal parts need-to-know and did-you-know information about the topics they care about most. Yahoo!'s deep understanding of how our audience consumes news, combined with Reveille's history of producing popular original programming, has helped us build a series that we believe will be a hit with Yahoo! News viewers."

Yahoo News attracts more than 43 million monthly unique visitors and reaches 21 percent of adults online, according to the press release.

The first episode debuted on the Web site's news page on Monday, provided details about the Shroud of Turin, along with the number of times it had been displayed, YahooNews reported. The series has been developed with help from Woody Thompson, who created the "Pop Up Video" series for VH1.