Niche Web sites draw advertisers
By Greg Farrell, USA TODAY
08/06/99- Updated 11:47 AM ET
NEW YORK -- Advertisers who want to reach Internet users are finally learning an
important lesson about the new medium: It's about class, not mass. And the classes of
people marketers can reach on line are much more precisely defined than the classes of
people they can reach through traditional forms of media, such as TV, radio and magazines.
 Planet Out:
Portal can give closeted gays a sense of community. |
Web-savvy marketers already knew that the Internet was a good place to reach
people interested in specific topics such as travel and financial information.
But the explosion of community Web sites -- or affinity portals -- that cater to
people from various backgrounds, from age and ethnicity to sexual orientation, is
providing marketers with opportunities that never existed before.
In the past year, several sites have demonstrated an ability to gather
hard-to-reach groups on line:
African-Americans
(see sidebar). Sites like NetNoir serve as portals for the 2.8 million black
households already on line. According to Forrester Research, African-Americans are
adopting the Internet at a faster rate than the rest of the population.
Hispanics (see
sidebar). Wall Street has taken note of how the 2.9 million-household
Hispanic-American on-line community is more Net penetrated than the Caucasian community.
Publicly traded companies StarMedia and Quepasa.com are benefiting.
Asian-Americans. This group, with 1.9 million on-line households, was an early
adopter of the Internet. Sites like Asian Avenue
have popped up to build this community.
College students. Collegeclub.com and studentadvantage.com are among the sites that have
targeted this group, which is notoriously difficult to reach via traditional media such as
TV.
But perhaps the most difficult community to reach is the gay and lesbian
population, which is estimated to comprise about 5% of the USA. Off line, this is a
difficult and expensive group to reach. The gay community is not monolithic. Despite the
hundreds of thousands of gays and lesbians who march in Gay Pride parades in New York and
San Francisco, there are large segments of the community who are not "out."
Advertisers can buy space in gay magazines and newspapers, but 28% of a
nationwide sample of gays polled by Greenfield Online said they had no access to a
publication aimed at them: Either local stores didn't stock them, or they didn't feel
comfortable buying the publications in public.
By contrast, there are no inhibitions preventing gays from congregating on line.
"This is the first time that a closeted person can participate fully in the
community," says Megan Smith, CEO of Planet Out,
an affinity portal that serves up an entire menu of information aimed at the gay market.
Adds Lou Fabrizio, vice president of advertising at Gay.com:
"On the Internet, you can be as 'out' as you want to be."
"The fact that the group faces some not-so-subtle forms of discrimination
makes them more cohesive and more likely to interact in an on-line community," says
David Alschuler, an analyst with the Aberdeen Group. "There are issues of privacy and
issues of physical security, as well as issues of building real community. You've got a
clearly demarcated and defined demographic group that is engaged by the sites, and it's a
group that has high economic buying power. It's not very wide, but it's very deep."
This concentration of affluent customers is helping gay affinity portals make
inroads with marketers.
"You get this opportunity to go after a large group of people, and reach
them easily," says Dan Springer, chief marketing officer at NextCard, which recently
began an $11 million affinity card program with Planet Out. " If I'm a member of the
gay community, and I subscribe to something, I might receive it once a month, and see the
ads then. But I might go every day onto a site like Planet Out, and spend 30 to 40 minutes
there. "
The Web can be more efficient than print. When Fabrizio worked at Out magazine,
its circulation was 118,000 and a full-page ad cost $15,000, meaning that it cost $127 to
reach 1,000 readers. For ads on Gay.com, the cost to reach 1,000 viewers is only $18.
According to Smith, marketers are responding to the new opportunities. Planet
Out has attracted advertising from GM's Saturn division, E-Trade, Barnesandnoble.com,
Sony, Hugo Boss and Starbucks. Some marketers, such as Hartford and Aetna, offer products
for gay couples.
Still, finding mainstream advertisers for a gay lifestyle Web site can be tricky
-- especially since some sites feature direct links to adult content. Advertisers who shun
heterosexual pornography don't look more kindly on same-sex pornography.
"That's the biggest trouble for most advertisers," says Jeffrey
Newman, president of Gay Financial News (gfn.com). "I
wouldn't want to get it while reading TheWall Street Journal, so why would I want to see
that material while I'm on gfn?"
Fabrizio and Smith say that their portals do not contain adult content.
