VentureBeat

While sites catering to females are becoming more prevalent on the web, many limit themselves by only playing to certain stereotypes. Yahoo’s new site, Shine, hopes to expand on this narrow thinking with a combination of original content, female bloggers as well as content from popular female publications such as Glamour, InStyle and Cosmopolitan.

As Yahoo summarizes its idea for the site on the Shine About page:

When we started talking about creating a new website for women, we wanted to avoid all of the common categories that advertisers or marketers tend to put us in. We didn’t want to be a site just for moms or just for single women or working women, or any specific demo- or psychographic. We wanted to create a smart, dynamic place for women to gather, get info and to connect with each other and the world around them.

While promising not to resort to the “lose 10 pounds fast” headlines that dominate magazine covers in grocery store checkout isles, Shine is aiming towards the more technically-savvy women who use Yahoo regularly. In fact, as many as 40 million women between the ages of 25 and 54 visit Yahoo every month, according to CNET, which also has a report stating women blog more than men do. The team running the site for Yahoo is entirely female, which is no doubt a smart idea.

Female-targeted sites such as CafeMom have been growing quickly and receiving funding thanks in part to strong partnerships with advertisers (our coverage). Glam is another female-oriented content and ad network that has been making a lot of headlines recently for both its growth and the big money attached to it (our coverage).

With Yahoo’s future still undecided pending the next move by Microsoft in its takeover bid, the company has certainly not stopped rolling out new sites and services. Shine follows the recent launches of Yahoo Buzz (our coverage), Yahoo Live (our coverage) and FireEagle (our coverage) to name a few.

While the big names in the social networking world, Facebook and MySpace, get most of the headlines, several niche networks are out there signing up millions of users. One such network is CafeMom, a social network for mothers, that has just raised a new round of funding.

Already positioned well with several big-name advertisers such as Wal-Mart, HP, Disney, Johnson & Johnson and General Mills, CafeMom hopes to use this new money to attract even more advertisers. They plan to do this by expanding operations — including their core and marketing teams, which will work to pull in more more traffic. The site claims to already have over 120 million monthly page views and 6 million monthly visits.

“The bigger we get, the more valuable we are,” CafeMom chief executive Michael Sanchez told me today in the context of pulling in more advertisers. Sanchez says their site offers companies a unique situation with regards to advertising because CafeMom has attracted what it considers to be influential mothers to its service. These are moms who try various products and then spread the word on what they like, whether it be by word-of-mouth or by writing something about them.

Sanchez noted that what has been driving the sites’ growth has really been the desires for moms in similar situations to open up with one another. Specifically, he spoke of a large community for pregnant mothers on the site and also one for mothers of autistic children who log on to share their experiences.

This latest round, valued at $12 million was co-led by original investors Highland Capital Partners and Draper Fish Jurvetson. Based in New York, CafeMom also raised a $5 million round in August of last year (our coverage). Prior to that the company had raised $50 million, mostly during the last Internet boom of the late 1990s/early 2000s.

CafeMom, a no-frills social network site for mothers, has raised $5 million in funding.

The site is owned by New York’s CMI Marketing, and gets its backing from Highland Capital Partners and Draper Fisher Jurvetson, who have supported the company for seven years, helping pump $50 million into the company — much of it coming during the last Internet boom. VentureWire (subscription required) first reported the funding news.

The company has struggled, flirting at times with profitability. Women-oriented sites are experiencing robust growth, as noted in previous coverage, suggesting this is a good a time as any for the company to get a second wind.

CafeMom’s action comes from participation with in certain groups, for example “Stay At Home Moms” which has 16,000 members. Users offer tips and practical advice. Other popular groups are “Toddler Moms” and “Raising Boys.” The company says it expects two million unique users in August. Some of that traffic is being bought with advertising on search engines. This morning, when we searched for “social network mothers” on Google, for example, CafeMom was advertising on the right hand side.

MomJunction.com, a similar company, raised $1.5 million in a first round of capital.

Other backers of CMI marketing over the years were Himalaya Capital Ventures and Perseus.