Grandparents.com launched this week, accompanied by articles in Advertising Age and Mediaweek. Grandparents might seem like a pretty tight niche, until you consider that they represent a huge chunk of spending power in children’s products–the average grandparent spends $500 per year on a grandchild, according to the Grandparent Marketing Group.

Grandparents.com is run by Yahoo! veteran Jerry Shereshewsky. The site has a nice opportunity to serve as a translator and cultural bridge to grandchildren by alerting grandparents to the hottest new gadgets and gifts. The site focuses on travel, gifts and social networking. One nice feature is an activities database that can be sorted for location, type and child’s age. I put it to the test by doing some test runs on Chicago–the town I know best. Content looked pretty good, even in a tough sort like “outdoor fun for teenagers.”

I asked the site’s management to answer a few questions about their plans:

Tell us a bit about your professional background and that of your partners, and how you came to focus on grandparents as a market.

There are lots of sites and organizations that are dedicated to the older age groups (AARP, etc). There are also lots of family sites that give parenting advice. Grandparents.com is the only Web site that speaks to grandparents as grandparents with regularity about a wide variety of topics relating to the grandparenting experience. Grandparents.com does not speak to our grandparents in terms of age. Rather, we speak to them based on a lifestage - people whose children have children of their own.

Not only do we have a distinguished editorial staff pulled from top tier media outlets like the Boston Globe and New York magazine, but we also have an expert advisory board of experienced grandparents. In addition, Grandparents.com also facilitates the conversation among its community of users. This way grandparents can generate reviews or comments from which other Grandparents can learn. If a segment of the community does not like what Grandparents.com has to say about a particular topic or article, they have the ability to share their thoughts with others through the tools we provide. In short, if we fail to provide the best content, our audience is going to let us and each other know.

Grandparents represent a fairly broad range of age. For that matter, so do grandchildren. Where are the best opportunities within the age ranges, and where will grandparents.com focus its content and marketing efforts?

We focused on Boomer grandparents because of their greater familiarity with the internet and online tools. However, the content of the site deals with issues and topics universal to all grandparents regardless of age. We speak to active grandparents who want to get the most out of their relationship with their grandchildren.

The site focuses on travel, gifts and advice, as well as blogs and social networking. Which of these areas do you expect to be most important to site users and advertisers?

In both qualitative and quantitative studies, we found that grandparents were looking for information on the topic areas we cover on the site. To over 95% of grandparents, their role as grandparent is a high priority in their life and the site’s editorial content reflects that fact. More than two-thirds of grandparents indicated that they wanted help with gifts and with activities. There has been a 60% increase in the amount of trips that children take with their grandparents since 1996. As such that was a natural focus area for Grandparents.com editorially. With the recent launch of the site, we are going to talk to our users to see which content and functional areas they find useful, which they don’t and what they would like us to build.

As for our advertisers, the meaningful content and features will be those that allow them to have a dialogue with our consumers. Great advertising is about having a great conversation. Grandparents.com would like to partner with advertisers who want to have such a conversation with our audience, understanding their role and profound value. This audience is the single largest demographic cut of the population other than gender and race and controls nearly 75% of the nation’s wealth.

Who do you see as your primary competition?

Lots of sites are dedicated to the older age groups, but no one is speaking to grandparents specifically. For example, some might call AARP a competitor, but we are really doing different things for many of the same people. AARP’s focus is much broader than Grandparents.com - generally speaking to an age rather than a lifestyle. Grandparents.com is all about one thing - facilitating special relationships between grandparents and grandchildren. While there are a few mom-and-pop sites on grandparenting, none have dedicated the resources to providing grandparents anything like Grandparents.com

Yahoo’s chief marketing guy in New York is joining a start-up focused on Boomer grandparents called Grantparents.com. The site already publishes a newsletter, and plans a fall launch of a social networking site. Jerry Shereshewsky also is CMO of one of two companies funding the start-up, Laser Partners. The other is TMS Partners. A brief ClickZ article is here. The other notable media targeting grandparents is Grand Magazine, which is in its third year of publication and claims circulation of 125,000.

Toy industry marketers are starting to realize their most important revenue growth in the years ahead will come from high-spending Boomer grandparents. That means they will need to get much smarter and more creative about reaching this most important target market. Right now, the industry’s sales are flat, according to NPD Group research released at the American International Toy Fair earlier this month. Meanwhile, BrandWeek noted that successful marketing campaigns “are shifting to preschool, which is one way of getting baby boomers to part with their cash.”

“Marketing to grandparents is huge,” said Jill Bazos, vp-marketing at Sababa Toys, which showed a vintage-inspired Classic Fisher-Price toy line designed to lure boomer buyers along with its classic-games-with-a-twist. “First, grandparents are young — Goldie Hawn is a grandparent — they have a lot of money, a lot of time, they are online and want to spoil their grandkids. People are getting older, older.”

The Grandparent Marketing Group pegs annual spending by grandparents on grandchildren at $50 billion—numbers that are sure to grow as more Boomers age into grandparenthood. Their interesting market statistics are here.