PlanetOut’s still struggling! Despite selling RSVP Vacations and splitting its stocks, the gay publishing company - which brings us Out and The Advocate [and gay.com, hello], among others - simply can’t find the cash to stay afloat.

In an effort to keep from going under completely, the company’s reportedly looking for a sugar daddy: · (Read More)

I still own all my PlanetOut stock - I think it was about 500 shares or so that I bought when I left the company—now about 50 after their recent 10-1 reverse split. I’ve kept it because it’s the only time I received an actual stock certificate, and having one with a tricker of LGBT is a cool piece of queer interweb history.

One of the comments on the linked post said “OUT once spoke to all gay men, it now speaks to a small percentage who buy Gucci and other fashion brands that have nothing to do with an average or successful gay consumer.”

I beg to differ that Out ever spoke for all gay men. For a period of time time, those magazines had the benefit of being novel and unique against a landscape of other lifestyle mags, but that time has passed. The changing landscape of queer politics and lifestyle have fractured and commodotized into a thousand different groups. Just like there is no monolithic “black vote” supporting Obama, queers are more diverse than a single, static, unpersonalized sheaf of pages can speak to.

With the web, they have the ability to behaviorally target the specific and varied interests of the reader, providing advertising and content that is relevant to different demographics, rather than just Guccigays. Sadly, PNO (and by extension out and the advocate) did not invest in their technology infrastructure to flex into this new mode of content delivery. They rested on the laurels of the gay.com domain, assuming that would bring in the eyeballs, while their competition became nimble and microtargeted their audiences… and as such, PNO continues its tailspin.

I want to see them survive - partly because of the staggering number of once prestigious brands that could go down with it, partly for the cool people who still work there, and partly because I can see a cool future for them, but they’ll need a massive infusion of strategy and cash in order to do so.