Yahoo! (YHOO) is showing some real strength in a couple of critical vertical markets where the portal and most of its competitors have a presence.

In the online photo storage and sharing segment, Yahoo! has put its own photo section together with its second photo property, Flickr. The result is that Yahoo! is now the second largest photo destination on the web with 6.2% of the market, according to HitWise. Photobucket still leads in share with an astonishing 43.5%, It’s a start.

Yahoo! now dominates the online game category. Based on numbers from comScore, as of May there were 217 million unique visitors to game websites. Yahoo! has 53 million unique visitors, followed by MSN with 40 million.

Now, if only the company can figure out how to make money on all of that traffic.

Douglas A. McIntyre