aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Saturday, March 04, 2006

Smitten w/gay media

Every six months we get a story like this:

Marketers have chased this niche for years. But the trend has gained juice lately among major media companies as ventures like Brokeback attract straight consumers in a more gay-tolerant culture:

• Bravo, the cable channel owned by NBC Universal, next month is launching OutzoneTV.com, billed as the first broadband entertainment channel for gay viewers.

• Sony Music is teaming with Matt Farber, founder of MTV Networks’ gay-themed cable channel Logo, to create a label featuring singers such as Beyoncé and Melissa Etheridge popular with gays.

• Warner Books, a division of behemoth Time Warner, published a romance novel for gay men, Hot Sauce, last summer. It was written by a Boston couple: Scott Pomfret, a Securities and Exchange Commission prosecutor, and Scott Whittier, an advertising copy writer.

Companies see big dollar signs, says Karen Haus, a software analyst at WR Hambrecht who follows PlanetOut, a conglomerate of gay-focused websites and magazines that went public in 2004. “Gay people have enormous disposable income,” Haus says.

First of all, some gay people have enormous disposal income. The income curve is an inverted one. We are over-represented at both ends of the income spectrum.

Second, I’m all for going after the gay market, but not at all convinced we want to be in a media ghetto. Here’s a clip of my interview with Carl Pritzkat of Mediapolis on the gay media marketplace today.

I think an urban contemporary, hip, gay sensibility, media property would be a broadly popular attractive proposition.