WESTLAKE VILLAGE, Calif.—VS Media’s flagship live cam site, Flirt4Free, has announced it will donate Gay.com, a multimillion-dollar domain the company acquired last year, to the Los Angeles LGBT Center after soliciting proposals from five charities that serve the LGBT community.
“The Los Angeles LGBT Center provides services for more LGBT people than any other organization in the world,” said Brad Estes, executive VP at Flirt4Free. “I’m very happy to announce that the future of Gay.com will go on within their extraordinary organization.”
After acquiring the domain last year and turning it into an online hub for LGBT individuals looking for a community, Estes and Flirt4Free President Gregory Clayman realized that they could go further. Together, they hatched a concept to transform the domain into something that would provide the maximum amount of support for the LGBT community. That’s how the idea for the “Gay.com Charity Challenge” was born.
“We reached out to five of the top LGBT charities and asked them to provide us with a proposal by July 1,” said Clayman. “The proposals detailed how each organization planned to use the site in order to further their organization while supporting the LGBT community as a whole.”
According to Clayman and Estes, all of the contributing charities brought great ideas to the table, but only one of them would be able to receive the donation.
“We were thrilled to see the enthusiasm and ideas the challenge brought forth by the various charities,” said Clayman after announcing the Los Angeles LGBT Center as the winning organization. “We believe that if they follow their plans as outlined, their efforts with the domain will have a massive impact on their charity and the LGBT community, not only in Los Angeles, but everywhere.”
VS Media’s Flirt4Free has shown a focused commitment to the gay cam space for over two decades, and according to Estes, this donation doesn’t change that commitment. Before the Gay.com acquisition, Flirt4Free already had laid claim to being the top live webcam company for gay users online, and the company consistently works to retain that title.
According to Estes, Flirt4free still has plans to turn the associated domain, Gayhub.com, into a community-building property that aligns with F4F values. “We can still accomplish our goals and do something great for the LGBT community at the same time,” said Estes.
The donation will be finalized early this month, allowing the Los Angeles LGBT Center to implement its plan for the domain. The first phase will see Gay.com become an additional domain for the organization’s newly launched blog (VanguardNow.org), which shares untold stories related to the center’s local and global work.
“We’re incredibly grateful to VSMedia for turning control of [Gay.com] to the world’s largest LGBT non-profit organization,” said Jim Key, the chief marketing officer at the Los Angeles LGBT Center. “We never could have imagined that one day ownership of such a valuable and iconic domain would be transferred to us.”
Since 1969, the Los Angeles LGBT Center has been celebrating, caring for, and championing LGBT individuals and families in Los Angeles and beyond. For years, the charity has held a four-star rating on Charity Navigator. Today, the center offers dozens of programs and services in four major categories: Health, Social Services and Housing, Culture and Education, and Leadership and Advocacy.
Future visitors on Gay.com will find stories about LGBT people, and they will also have the opportunity to learn more about the Los Angeles LGBT Center and support its work to “build a world where LGBT people thrive as healthy, equal, and complete members of society.” According to Key, however, that’s only the beginning.
“We’ve only just begun to think about the tremendous possibilities for the domain,” said Key.
To learn more about the Los Angeles LGBT Center and everything it does for the LGBT community, click here.
