Experts in homosexual Internet erotica guestimate this emerging side of the adult industry has a global worth of hundreds of millions of dollars per year. Statistics show that gay and bisexual sites may account for as much as one-third of the current sex-related traffic on the Web.
Regardless of the actual numbers, virtually everyone involved in the adult Net agrees that it's one of the fastest growing segments of the industry, increasing in popularity and presence on an almost daily basis.
Ed Rampell takes an in-depth look at the gay side of the adult Web; how it started, what it is today, and where it's likely to be in the not-too-distant future.
A New Frontier
Gay sites are widely regarded as being more lucrative than their heterosexual counterparts. "The gay adult Web is a huge, huge industry," declares Gerry Moylan of Silly Webit, the parent company of GayLA.com (www.gayla.com), a pay site for gay and bisexual men. "Even though we have a number of straight Web sites and gay sites, we always do much more business on the gay side." Moylan says that GayLA, which started doing business "around 1995," earns more than $100,000 per year. The openly gay Web master says the favorable rate of return is not due to pricing, because the rates are generally the same for Silly Webit's heterosexual and homosexual services. Rather, he believes, the higher profitability of gay sites is due, in part, to the fact that "today, the competition among straight Web sites is far greater than for gay adult Web sites."
Robert Stevens, Manager of Gay Services for Toronto-based Python Communications, Inc. (www.pythonvideo.com), which got into the gay side of the adult Net around mid-1999, agrees. Stevens claims Python's homoerotica "is actually doing very well, because there's a large market out there for it. And if you can provide quality, you can do very well." Stevens personally estimates that between 20 to 30 percent of the adult Net is gay, out of a global industry worth 100 million dollars a year.
Room for Growth
Moylan says that because an estimated 10 percent of the population is gay, that leaves straight adult Web sites to compete for the theoretical 90 percent of traffic that is heterosexual. But, he points out, despite these numbers, there are still a relatively small number of gay Web sites vying for that homosexual customer base - a base which, on a global scale, is potentially quite vast.
Moylan contends that if "company A splits down the middle, five straight Web sites and five gay Web sites, and they gross $50,000 a month, right now, probably $30,000 to $35,000 out of that $50,000 is coming in from the gay sites. A lot of people would be very surprised by that, but we follow our own numbers on a week to week, day to day basis. It just shows you the breakdown. There is so much more competition [on the straight side], it is so fierce out there, that the market is obviously beginning to saturate. On the gay side, there's no way that it's saturated. There's still a lot more room for it."
Less is More
Furthermore, gay-site Web masters interviewed for this piece are convinced that homoerotic sites have better conversion rates. "Oh yeah, absolutely," asserts Moylan. "When somebody finds www.gayla.com, they discover they do get everything that we offer. And we offer them things that are always updating or something they can turn to on a daily basis. Such as, checking out messages sent to them on our message board. There's a trust factor, and they know that they found the site they're looking for, and they'll stick around at this site. It seems to have everything they need."
Python's Stevens agrees that gay sites have a better conversion rate than straight Web sites do. "A higher number is bad, because you're looking at more traffic per sign on," he explains. "For example, a good straight site might get one person per 300 to 350 to sign up, whereas in the gay market it's one in 200 to 250. It takes less traffic to convert, and where the straight market is flooded, you haven't reached that point yet with the gay market."
"The higher conversion rate for gay sites comes down to sheer numbers," Moylan says. "[A surfer] might check out other sites, but because there's less competition out there, there's more likelihood that, for example, GayLA will retain more members than Silly Webit's Aboutsex - a straight site which does very well. At any given time, [both sites] might sell the same number of trial memberships that expire in three days, and the person either cancels or stays on. But three days later, if you look, the conversion is always higher on our gay Web site.
Greener Pa$ture$?
Another economic factor contributing to the success of gay Web sites is that discretionary income for gays is believed to be higher than that of straights.
Stevens points out that, in general gay males have more disposable income and less attachments financially than straight males do. Moylan elaborates, saying that "the average gay person is certainly going to have more freeedom to spend money, because the assumption is they're not married and don't have kids."
Some also believe gays are, as a group, better educated than straights and have higher paying jobs, but this may be a stereotype.
Regardless, this phenomenon is not going unnoticed among Web masters and content providers in general, Moylan notes. "There's more people getting involved in the gay market," he says. "Even if they're not gay, they're starting to realize, 'hey, there's no reason to turn our back on this, look at this.'"
But Moylan points out that while the homoerotic sector of the industry presents growth potential and opportunity, it doesn't exactly mean that gay sites are virgin territory. "It's certainly not a small industry. There's plenty of companies out there promoting gay adult services. But there's still less competition in the gay adult industry," he states.
The Double Whammy: Coming Out of the Cyber-Closet
By the standards of bourgeois society, pornography is taboo, and so is homosexuality. Thus, the gay Web bears the onus of a double-negative; which also raises the question of whether hetero Web masters discriminate against their gay brethren.
"Ultimately, there are always the inherent fears, which get translated into subtleties," offers Stevens, "but no, I figure it's a very sexual industry, so the homophobia is not prevalent, if it's there at all."
Stevens also pointed out that the overwhelming majority of Web masters dealing with gay material are actually straight. Cybersocket (www.cybersocket.com) President Morgan Sommer states, "the general perception from the gay Web masters I talk to is a feeling of being kind of ignored or marginalized. What I think is reality is that the men who own most of the content producers, even the gay content production companies, are virtually all straight. I don't think they have any problem at all with gay men or gay sex. I think they like selling gay products, and they'd probably love to sell more gay products. So, something needs to be done to bridge the gap between perception and reality - marketing and outreach."
Sommer also points out that "sexuality is central to gay identity, and the porn industry is certainly a big part of gay culture. Gay porn stars are fairly large fixtures in gay culture. And I'd say it's very disproportionate to the way straight porn stars are [treated] in mainstream culture."
Moylan, who is homosexual, asserts the gay Net is generally ignored by the industry at large. "We just got back from the ia2000 in Miami, and with the exception of some of the booths inside, the general feel of the convention is you have all these people running around, promoting pretty much straight, general adult Web sites," he says. "You've got the girls running around in bikinis... It was very much geared towards sex and erotica, but there was really nothing out in the open about gay adult Webbing."
The result, Moylan says, is that despite the gay adult Net's high rate of profitability, many companies are missing out, professionally as well as personally. "There are a lot of big companies out there who make tons of money off of straight erotica, and they're getting into gay erotica, but they're still shunning it, or ignoring it, or they're just thinking it's not for them. Some of these larger companies, where maybe the CEO is a little homophobic, don't really put their business savvy and energy toward something like the adult gay industry. They put it all towards tits and ass.
"This is fine with me," continues Moylan, "because we're doing a lot of business on the gay side of the industry. But at the same time, maybe if there were more of a focus on it, then [there would be] more business and more opportunities... Because if there's more attention paid to it, then obviously, there's more money put into it, and things would only get bigger and better."
The Safety Net
In conventional society, even more so than in the adult community, widespread attitudes towards homosexuality often range from neglect or disapproval to repression, persecution, and outright hate. For those who dare not voice their sexual preference in public - for fear of reprisal, of getting fired, or worse - the Information Superhighway offers a chance to pursue at least some facet of their sexual orientation in the privacy of their homes.
"Take the real obvious example," says Moylan, "some guy in the Mid-West in a small town or city, where there's no way there would even be a gay bar or gay anything near him. And what are his choices? They'll do things like get on a plane and go on a gay cruise. Or go to California or New York, just to explore, go out and be involved in some type of gay event, whether it's nightclubs, cruises, whatever. Now this guy can be in his house, and in the privacy of his home, go online and not only view gay material, he can go into gay chat rooms, post to message boards, make friends, view live feeds, whatever."
There is another virtual appeal of the Web for Cyber-sexers - particularly for those in a community that had been especially ravaged by AIDS. "It's certainly safe sex when you're online," states Moylan, who also points out that Cybersocket and many other sites provide health-related information for surfers.
