Magazine Moolah
by Brandon Palmer
 If you
spend any time on the Web at all (sarcasm intended), you may have
at least a passing familiarity with a new crop of magazine-style plug-in
sites that are popping up across the Internet.
Seeing a niche to be filled, new launches are attempting to compete
with the relatively small number of magazine sites that have been
serving both gay and straight customers for some time. With many different
packages available, and various financial arrangements, online magazines
can be a good way to bring well produced content to your site.
Many webmasters face the problem of placing and keeping something
interesting, provocative and attractive on a site. The major challenge
to maintaining a good lucrative site is, of course, content. You need
"glue" to promote stickiness and keep people coming back, and a well
designed product to please your demographic. Of course, you need to
bear in mind that you are competing with scores of online outfits,
as well as the enormous print media and video industry. So how do
you stay afloat in a sea of images and content, all screaming for
the customer's attention?
The answer is in offering constantly updated content - pictures, video,
and text - that is well produced, well placed, and cycled often enough
to keep customers returning. Some sites can make a profit using a
digital camera and a few open minded friends. Others might feature
live chat, or the often overused Web cam format. Each of these might
be an option, but few of us have the resources to keep this type of
site fresh and ever changing. So, many of us turn to professionally
produced plug-in content that is available for site placement. This
is where the magazine format might be a perfect fit for some sites.
If you haven't tiptoed through the fairly lush garden of gay plug-in
magazines, it can be a daunting journey. There are lots of new sites
popping up to fill this market. Each offers not only different financial
arrangements - commission versus flat fee - but also a variety of
sexual orientations, content options, and weekly or monthly site updates.
What are these outfits offering, and how will my site benefit from
a relationship with these companies?
In general there are two types of Web magazines competing to be linked
to your site:
1. Magazines that provide professional, diverse content viewable on
your site, and charge you a monthly fee for usage. These are large,
expensive looking sites with tons of images and video, and in some
cases prestigious contributors. Each claims that the fee they charge
is well worth it, and will bring a plethora of visitors to your site.
2. Magazines that bring visitors from your site to their own and offer
you a commission on subscriptions and renewals. These magazines offer
attractive packages designed to make you money on every hit they receive.
The tradeoff is that visitors often must leave your site to get to
theirs. You make the money, but you lose the surfer.
3. OK, one more: There are some that fall between the categories,
such as Boyu.com, that offer commissions but keep the viewer on your
site.
Here are a couple examples from each category, what they provide,
and what they want from you:
Possibly one of the largest gay plug-in magazines, Dickmag.com, is
a panacea of slick images. The magazine's promotion announces, "Dirty
Pictures, sexy stories, naked guys, really dirty cartoons, naked boys,
and of course, naked pictures!" Not great copy, but a cursory glance
reveals all of this and more. Dick costs the webmaster $250 a month
(updated monthly), with no volume usage or bandwidth usage charges.
They boast a stellar group of writers, cartoonists and contributors
whose work appears in well known gay publications and on Manhattan's
adult access cable television. Dickmag.com offers webmasters a free
preview of the magazine, and you can get instant linkage to the magazine
by filling out a subscription form.
The price of Dick is pretty standard. Other online magazines selling
their product to straight sites charge about the same, such as Focus
Adult (www.focusadult.com),
whose price is $249 a month. Focus Adult does advertise "content diversity,"
and does offer gay photos and video content changed monthly, as with
its straight content.
Falling into category number two, free magazines that offer commissions
on sales, is the newly launched Cybererotica site (www.cecash.com).
CE offers a large assortment of niche magazines, both gay and straight,
with everything from straight teens, matures and foot fetish to various
areas of gay content. They even have something called "crazy balloon
sex." According to their promo, CE Mags offers video, photos, stories,
chat, and cartoons. CE offers you a commission per active subscriber
and per active member. The downside is that the visitor must leave
your site to view the content and to subscribe to the magazine. In
other words, you're making money, but you're sending people away from
your site to do it.
But, as mentioned, there are magazines that fall between the two categories,
offering commissions without deterring visitors from your site. Boyu.com
fills a niche market, featuring pictures of college-aged men. A good,
slick production, the site is set up like a college dorm where customers
are referred to as "students." Boyu.com is a "free affiliate gallery
system" that promotes itself as "easy to set up, designed to sell."
They offer updates weekly, a plus over the monthly mags. Content displays
on your site so customers do not leave you never to return. You make
a commission on each subscription they sell. They tout their magazine
as perfect for TGP pages, AVS sites, free sites and link sites. You
earn commission money by numbers of sign-ups from your site. The commission
may not be as high as an outfit like CE, but this might be an option
if you are invested in keeping visitors right where they are.
The various offers and wealth of content can be daunting. You might
sort through a large number of possibilities before even getting a
notion of what will work on your site and how to set it up so it makes
you a profit and doesn't lose customers. But there seem to be some
very good, well designed options among these outfits, and it would
not be surprising to see more and more sites taking this route. However,
as many of these outfits are newly launched, there are no hard figures
available on how much money is being made, or how it is affecting
sites already using these products. Furthermore, the companies mentioned
chose not to comment for this story. So, as with all new ventures,
proceed with caution, testing, and above all, patience.
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