The purse strings haven’t completely closed for start-ups looking to raise money–even niche Web sites that hope to stay afloat by selling advertising.

Wowowow.com, a site launched earlier this year, which targets women over 40, has raised a $1.5 million round led by Bob Pittman’s Pilot Group and the Rhime Group.

No word on valuation, but I’d guesstimate Wowowow.com’s investors peg its value in the high seven-figure range. The company has now raised $3.1 million in less than a year.

The five founders–former publisher Joni Evans, “60 Minutes” reporter Lesley Stahl; New York Post gossip columnist Liz Smith; ad exec Mary Wells; and Wall Street Journal political columnist Peggy Noonan–contributed $200,000 each in an initial round. Some of the company’s high-profile pals, like Whoopi Goldberg and Candice Bergen, later kicked in another $600,000.

Is that money well spent? We’ll see. Publishing is a tough business, even for lean Web operations, and advertisers generally steer clear of small sites. The company launched with a series of high profile sponsors; from what I can tell, at least some of them–like Citigroup (C) and Sony (SNE)–are still there.

And Pittman, the former MTV and AOL executive, has garnered new respect as a Web investor (Full disclosure: Pittman’s company invested in Silicon Alley Media, my former employer), so presumably he sees something there.

One plus: Wowowow.com is boasting rapid growth. The site, which launched in March, says it attracted 600,000 unique visitors last month. That number is much higher than outside estimates from outfits like Compete and Quantcast, but that kind of discrepancy is par for the course for any Web publisher.

In any case, if Wowowow.com wants to make a go of it, it’s going to need to attract at least one million uniques a month, a goal the company says it will achieve “early next year.”

BoomTown’s Kara Swisher dropped by the company’s New York offices earlier this year; here’s a video that documents her visit.

That site, Wowowow.com–The Women on the Web–is now up and running, aimed at women over 40. The site is designed to be a kind of digital conversation among Stahl and her friends, in the form of blogs, questions, interviews and letters.

Wowowow’s five high-powered founders, each of whom contributed $200,000 to the effort, include: Stahl; well-known book publisher Joni Evans; gossip columnist Liz Smith; ad exec Mary Wells; and political columnist Peggy Noonan.

A lot of the fare is pretty glamorous, given that they have also recruited some flashy regular contributors, including Candice Bergen, Whoopi Goldberg, Judith Martin, Sheila Nevins, Joan Juliet Buck, Lily Tomlin, Marlo Thomas, Julia Reed and Jane Wagner.

The impetus for the site came from Evans, CEO of Wowowow, who had gotten bored with the lack of sites aimed at smart, savvy women like herself and her friends. Although she had spent her career in an analog world, Evans was intrigued by the idea of using digital tools to create a kind of virtual cocktail party.

Topics will range from politics to fashion to relationships and more. The appeal, presumably, is that it is all mixed in with the glamor and celebrity of the partners and contributors.

Eventually, the site will jack up the interactivity, with more contributions from users, and also a social-networking element.

The business plan? Well, advertising, of course. So far, the site has gotten sponsorships from Tiffany (TIF), Sony (SNE) and Citi (C).

Here is a video I made of my visit to Wowowow’s new offices in Manhattan: