Stop the presses

Holy smokes. The California-based PlanetOut Inc., already a hefty queer media group (it also owns the monster Gay.com and a handful of consumer websites), went public a little while back. Not the firs t queer company to go public in North America, but the only successful one.  Today P-Out announced that it's bought LPI Media, the conglomerate that publishes The Advocat e, Out Magazine, HIVPlus and Out Traveller.

The cost? US$31.1 million. The details are here. This is going to change the queer media landscape. More later..


POSTED THURSDAY MORNING: Yep, queers have arrived, triumphantly buying into the current economic hoopla that bigger is better. (Media nuts can read the basics here (oh, this need to refer to gay companies as getting married is haha tedious, izzenit). In any case, P-Out had some serious debt in past years, and needs the revenue that LPI can probably provide -- LPI was a private company, so I haven't seen its balance sheet. A critique of LPI/P-Out bigness is here. (Each business model has its pluses and minuses. While Oples offers absolute editorial freedom, for example, the implications of $10 a month in ad revenues are depressingly obvious.)

The North American queer print media market has a handful of large players. In Canada, there's Pink Triangle Press, which publishes "Xtra" papers in Vancouver, Ottawa, and Toronto, plus associated websites and annual yellow pages; the company has at least one stand-alone Internet project (a men's dating/sex site), and also runs dating phone lines in various cities.

In the United States, PlanetOut now has a stranglehold on national print media. There are competitors in each sector -- 365gay.com, the national Instinct mag -- but the new P-Out is the giant. The country's other large media co. is Window Media, which has focussed on local acquisitions. It owns directly (or indirectly through sibling companies) the Washington Blade, New York Blade, Houston Voice, Southern Voice (Atlanta), Express Daily News (Florida), and the national men's glossy, Genre. Plus nightlife guides in Miami and Atlanta.

Whether monster publishers are balancing potential political might with readability and entertainment is up to each reader to decide.

BTW, the first queer media company to hit the North American stock exchange was G Society. Its initial incarnation went bust. Hard to say exactly what happened, as no one's really talking (see the first and second stories here. Some sort of legal kerfuffle placed the day-to-day running of G Society's portfolio in the hands of new management, Hyperion Interactive Media. (H.I.M.'s Matt Skallerud administers the e-mail subscription list for the queer media trade publication Press Pass Q, which I edit. He declined to discuss the legal details when I asked a while back.) H.I.M.-slash-G-group continues to grow, with an ever growing collection of queer sites (like the huge Gaywired.com and the national GayWebMonkey magazine). HIM -- also American -- is the other big queer print/Internet media company on the continent.