death of print, out, the advocate, here! network, planetout

PlanetOut sells print business to gay TV service

Bill Gates's money hasn't been enough to staunch the bleeding at PlanetOut. The San Francisco-based gay-media company is finalizing a deal to sell its magazine and book publishing business to the Here Network, a gay and lesbian video-on-demand service. The company publishes leading gay-interest mags The Advocate and Out. Subscribers were up but ad pages down in 2007. A decline in advertising from pharmaceutical companies hurt The Advocate. PlanetOut will keep its online properties such as Gay.com, and promises to promote Here movies as part of the deal.

10:20 AM on Fri Apr 11 2008
By Jackson West
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4 comments

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BartKela at 08:24 PM on 04/11/08
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Hi,

I don't really have much to say since I'm not gay, but I noticed that this item was posted ten hours ago and has less than eighty views and zero comments.

Even by Valleywag standards, that's pretty pathetic, so I thought I would increase the view count by one and add the first comment.

Good luck with this blogging thing.
Owen Thomas at 09:03 AM on 04/12/08
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Connectedness Index: 509
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@BartKela: Perhaps we underplayed this story. With its purchase of a print-magazine business, PlanetOut once fancied itself the "AOL Time Warner of gay media," back when being the AOL Time Warner of anything was considered desirable. This sale reinforces the lesson that one should be careful what one wishes for.
smkr4 at 06:41 PM on 04/12/08
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Well, PlanetOut has been a very poorly run business since it's inception. I don't speak from any insider knowledge per se, but ... well, every gay person (myself included) has used gay.com at least once in their lives, and practically every gay person who is also in the tech business knows how unbelievably bad it is from a technical and business standpoint.

For example: it's a service that, in the year 2008, requires a (rather expensive) paid membership to view full profiles for individual members. Paid social networking! What a great business model! Imagine if Facebook charged you to view your friends' full profiles ...

And let's say you pay. Well, noone else can view your profile without paying. So what's the point? Gay.com, by itself, actually runs a business that is the illogical inverse of everything the rest of the web does.

If subscribers to The Advocate and Out were up in 2007, that's probably because PNO was shilling free subscriptions as part of the gay.com package. And yet the basic core of their web presence, gay.com, still doesn't have a reasonable business model to support its own weight. That's to say nothing of the infuriating, fat-client Java that runs the thing (imagine MySpace on crack).

There's definitely a reasonable user base and market opportunity in this niche, but PNO won't fill it. Presumably some upstart entrepreneur can, but the cynic in me says that Barry Diller will leverage Ask.com for some nonsense gay portal the same way he did for RushmoreDrive.com ... ;-)
BartKela at 07:02 PM on 04/12/08
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Isn't Out magazine a freebie now?

I thought I saw a short stack by the front door of the Good Vibrations store on Valencia today, but I didn't look closely.