The Advocate Partners with The Gay.com Network

Posted on April 12, 1999

The Advocate, the nation's leading magazine for gays and lesbians, and Online Partners' Gay.com Network have announced a joint partnership. The Advocate, the 32-year-old biweekly newsmagazine of record for gay America, has a readership of over 200,000; the Gay.com Network hosts over 5 million visitors per month.

The partnership joins the two media companies in an exclusive content-sharing and advertising alliance. Under the terms of the agreement, the Gay.com Network will host the Advocate site and will feature late-breaking headlines from Advocate Online. The companies will also bundle print and online advertising opportunities.

The Advocate/Gay.com alliance will benefit from the Gay.com eCommunity e-commerce program, which uses online tools, such as chat rooms, e-mail and message boards, to research and develop promotional programs for the highly-targeted communities. Although most information is gathered online, it can be easily leveraged into offline programs, such as print, broadcast or special events.

"eCommunity lets us interact with more fully with our readers, allowing us to develop editorial strategies that are specifically aimed at their interests and which may ago well beyond the material in the print magazine," said Jim Franklin, President of Liberation Publications Inc., publisher of The Advocate. "In addition, we can conduct online real-time research; make presentations and lead focus groups based on our editorial; test ads online before we run them in print; and let users order products online based on the ads they read in The Advocate."