• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, June 20, 2007

Real Girls Media, the brainchild of industry vet Kate Thorp, has launched Divine Lens, an independent film channel on its female-focused Web portal DivineCaroline.com. The portal has also begun running its first video ads, although they will not accompany the film footage for the time being.

Aided by production agency Argot Pictures and video technology company Brightcove, Divine Lens features documentaries by female filmmakers along with director interviews, film excerpts and trailers.

Divine Lens is launching with several offerings, including the Oscar winning "My Country My Country," "On the Downlow," "The Business of Being Born" and "The War Tapes."

Along with familiar content categories aimed at women's audiences such as relationships, parenting and style, DivineCaroline emphasizes Web 2.0 features including interactive publishing and personal profiles.

A centerpiece of the site is a proprietary online publishing system that allows registered users to submit stories, articles and reviews and select accompanying digital photos for posting to one of the site's nine content areas. The sections, from home and food to career and money, are overseen by a group of staff editors with professional backgrounds in journalism or publishing.

Thorp, who left as president, digital worldwide at AKQA in January 2006 to start Real Girls Media, explained why she's presently choosing to separate video from video ads.

"You have to have a very good payoff to interrupt someone with a video ad," she said. "Our audience is a high-consumption audience, but they do it in a very sampling way."

Ad partners presently include Sears, AT&T, Microsoft, DoubleTree Hotels and Target, among others.

According to comScore, the site attracted 140,000 visits in April and 96,000 in May, although Thorp insisted that visits have more than doubled month-over-month.

"We subscribe to two paid services, who don't user panels, who tell us our traffic has doubled," said Thorp.

All the same, comScore ranks DivineCaroline as the 67th-most-visited women's site in a field presently dominated by NBC's iVillage and fashion network Glam.com.

In November, DivineCaroline received $6 million in first-round funding from London-based investment firm 3i and San Francisco venture firm Walden VC--where Thorp started Real Girls as an entrepreneur-in-residence.

Clearly a formidable demographic, females make up a slight majority of the total U.S. online audience--97 million females to 90 million males--according to a report released by eMarketer in April.

By year's end, Real Girls Media plans to debut two sister sites--one aimed at teenage girls, the other at women 18-25--that employ the same underlying software as DivineCaroline.