Ms. Mayer says that she wants to make Yahoo a “daily habit” for its 800 million users. But she doesn’t want people to come to Yahoo just to read email, post photographs on Flickr or get the latest sports scores. She also wants Yahoo to be a place where they curl up and spend some time, whether they are into haute couture, the latest gadgets or tabloid gossip.

And curling up right beside them would be the advertisers.

Built using technology acquired last year as part of the company’s $1.1 billion purchase of Tumblr, the new publications combine original articles and material licensed from other sites, as well as big photos and videos into an endless page of tiles aimed at enticing people to linger. Mixed into that stream is a different kind of advertising — so-called native ads or sponsored posts — which look almost exactly like all the other articles and videos on the page except that they are sponsored by brands like Knorr, Best Buy and Ford Motor. These ads, Yahoo hopes, will attract the attention of more readers and make more money for the company.

In some cases, Yahoo editors even help to write that advertising — a blurring of the traditional lines between journalists and the moneymaking side of the business.

“We think that digital magazines can be a great advance, creating a different category of content consumption,” Ms. Mayer said in an interview a few months ago at the company’s headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif. “You can layer in video. You can change the content. You can bring in the social aspect. You can tell someone, ‘Oh, by the way, your friend also read this article and thought it was interesting.' ”

Ms. Mayer has spent millions of dollars on this push, much of it to recruit celebrity talent. The newest magazine, Yahoo Beauty, which went online on Monday, is edited by Bobbi Brown, founder of the cosmetics line that bears her name. The company has also snagged big names like Joe Zee, formerly creative director of Elle, and David Pogue, a best-selling author of personal technology books and a former columnist for The New York Times.