Ian Johnson, Out Now
September 28, 2007
The leading US mainstream media analysis publication, Editor and Publisher has an interesting article on the strength of traditional print gay and lesbian media.
That is good news that acknowledges the continuing and growing comfort that mainstream brands have in developing gay and lesbian communications strategies to target the lesbian and gay consumer market.
What we are always most concerned by at Out Now is how well do the brands advertising in lesbian and gay media market themselves and properly position their communications targeting gay consumers.
Here is an extract from that article:
For Gay Press, 'Good Old Days' Are Here
NEW YORK--For gay newspaper publishers, the good old days are now.
"Compared to 23 years ago?" Publisher Tracy Baim says with a laugh, referring to the year the weekly Windy City Times was founded in Chicago. "I think it's a great time to be in gay publishing. It's so much easier than it was even 10 years ago to pitch to mainstream businesses".
Indeed, according to the Gay Press Report, advertising spending in publications, about half of them weekly newspapers targeting the so-called GLBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered) audience, increased 205% between 1996 and 2006.
Last year's ad revenues of $223.3 million represented an increase of 5.2% over the year before -- a period during which print and online ad spending on daily newspapers was essentially flat. In 1994, just 19 Fortune 500 brands advertised in the gay press. Last year, 183 did.
The recent performance of the gay papers is all the more remarkable because not so long ago, it appeared the stars were aligning against them. The Internet looked poised to steal whole categories of advertising, especially personals and other same-sex classifieds, and underfunded gay papers were slow to jump on the Web. Mainstream papers, which long shunned coverage of homosexuality or shrouded it in euphemism, were now providing forthright and faster news of gay-interest topics.
Ad spending in the gay press contracted 17.8% between 2002 and 2003 -- reflecting not only the post-9/11 doldrums but the fact that GLBT papers were being folded across the country.
"In this market, people did have a dollar and a dream," says Todd Evans, president and CEO of Rivendell Media Inc., a gay media rep firm that produces the Gay Press Report with the ad agency Prime Access Inc. "You had a lot of people who were more about the cause than the business, and unfortunately you have to pay attention to business, too."
But the shakeout left survivors stronger than ever, Evans contends. These days, he says, there are fewer startups -- but there are also fewer papers folding.
Sue O'Connell, co-publisher of Bay Windows, a Boston weekly, says, "One of the practical reasons we are in great shape compared to mainstream media is that our profit margins are not as high as the dailies -- so we've been living in the real world all along. " Gay papers have always had to be nimble, adjusting as ad categories bubble up and burst.
And one big selling point for gay papers, publishers say, is that their audience is incredibly loyal to retailers and brands that advertise in gay media. When Rivendell did the first study of gay readers in 1984, an astounding 98% of respondents said they would go out of their way to buy the products or services of advertisers in gay media — and would even pay more for them.
Those loyalty levels remain at the 90% level even now, Rivendell's Evans says.
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