Since its earliest days, PlanetOut Inc. has boldly walked its own path. From the moment the company started as a small personal website, through the union of two rivals, to its emergence as a global brand, PlanetOut Inc.'s history is decidedly "unstraight."
In 1994, the company's co-founder, Mark Elderkin, decided to see if he could register the domain name "Gay.com." To his surprise, he got it. An even bigger surprise came when users began inundating what then was his personal webpage featuring a picture of his dog. Mark recognized that, for many of those coming to Gay.com, the Web was a lifeline. It reduced feelings of isolation for openly gay people as well as those struggling to come out. Seeing the potential for a business focused on helping gays and lesbians connect with information and others like them, Elderkin re-launched Gay.com in 1996 as a chat service.
At roughly the same time, Tom Rielly, an early pioneer of the gay and lesbian Web, launched PlanetOut Corp. which served gay programming on MSN, Yahoo! and AOL. While PlanetOut Corp. focused on content, Gay.com continued to build its robust community through chat. As they grew, both San Francisco-based companies started earning attention and accolades.
In October 1996, PlanetOut Corp. secured the company's first venture capital and corporate backing from AOL and Sequoia. In 1998, PlanetOut was named "Best of the Best" by Yahoo! Internet Life Magazine, received a Webby "People's Voice" award, a GLAAD Media Award and a ComputerWorld/Smithsonian medal for outstanding innovation in information technology.
The next year Gay.com received the "Best Community Site Award" from Yahoo! Internet Life and the National Gay and Lesbian Journalists Association "Excellence in New Media Award." By 1999, Gay.com was now drawing more than one million pairs of eyeballs a month, more viewers than the combined print circulations of all the leading LGBT U.S. national monthly print publications, including Genre, Curve, Out and The Advocate. By early 1999, Gay.com had become the #1 online community on the Web for audience retention and usage as ranked by Media Metrix.
In the spring of 1999, Gay.com merged with Gay.net parent company OnlinePartners.com, Inc. (Online Partners). At the same time, the company secured an agreement to acquire OnQ, AOL's original gay community. With three mergers in less than a few months, Online Partners needed to find a way to get its heritage organizations to work successfully together under one roof. In July 1999, the company hired a new CEO, Lowell Selvin, who came to Online Partners with organizational savvy, a track-record of winning entrepreneurial ventures and a reputation for launching successful product and service lines for large, established corporations. Selvin also arrived with a deep personal commitment to Online Partners' mission and a plan to secure the funding needed to fuel its expansion.
Online Partners and PlanetOut Corp. continued garnering traffic and advertising dollars, so in 1999 both companies brought their growth stories to the financial community. PlanetOut Corp. closed its second round of financing with backing from Silicon Valley's Mayfield Fund, Eden Capital and Real Networks. Online Partners' then closed its largest round of venture capitalfinancing, with backing from Jerry Colonna's and Fred Wilson's Flatiron Partners, Chase Capital, IDG Ventures, Bill Jesse and John Hansen's Jesse.Hansen & Co. and David Bohnett's Baroda Ventures.
With money to grow, both companies began to round out their offerings, connecting millions of visitors to channels for news, travel, personal finance, shopping, entertainment, and activism. Online Partners used the funding to expand internationally, making acquisitions and opening offices in Europe and Latin America. PlanetOut Corp. purchased the gay travel newsletter "Out&About," which would eventually evolve to power the travel sections of Gay.com and PlanetOut.com. With growing cultural acceptance of the gay community and increasing understanding of this lucrative market segment, companies like American Airlines, Johnson & Johnson, and IBM came to the sites to reach what the company believes to be the largest aggregation of gay consumers in history.
In 2000, more than 80-percent of revenues for both companies came from selling banner ads, but Online Partners and PlanetOut Corp. were making moves to diversify their revenue streams. Gay.com moved to acquire Kleptomanic.com, an e-commerce company targeting gay consumers, and both companies were hard at work developing their premium membership services, Gay.com Premium Services and PlanetOut PersonalsPlus, that would complement their chat and programming offerings. As the product teams for Online Partners and PlanetOut Corp. each individually explored how to bring customers together, Selvin and PlanetOut Corp. CEO, Megan Smith, began exploring how to bring the companies together.
In December 2000, Online Partners agreed to acquire PlanetOut Corp., creating PlanetOut Partners, Inc. In the merger, the Boards and management of both companies saw the potential to serve members more effectively by aggregating resources, offering a broader range of services and attracting even more advertisers. In April 2001, Online Partners successfully completed its acquisition of PlanetOut Corp. marking what some have described as the biggest gay wedding in history.
The post-acquisition honeymoon was made all the more sweet by the growing popularity of the company's online dating services. PlanetOut Partners' members wanted more from a matchmaking service than just a way to find Mr. or Ms. Right. Personals technology added yet another layer to the company's community offerings and gave gays and lesbians a valuable new means to meet others for both love and friendship. On Valentine's Day 2003, Gay.com posted its one millionth personals ad. In less than a year, that number would double.
In April 2004, PlanetOut Partners Inc. became, simply, PlanetOut Inc. Today, more than 3.5 million active members on PlanetOut's flagship sites, Gay.com and PlanetOut.com, make up a virtual metropolis that is bigger than the city of Chicago. The LGBT community now represents a reported buying power of $485 billion annually in the United States alone and FORTUNE 500 advertisers are taking notice. Companies like General Motors, Bristol Meyers Squibb, Wrigley's and Universal are among many reaching what the company believes is the largest network of gay and lesbian people in the world through Gay.com and PlanetOut.com's specialized content channels and community areas.
A leading media company serving the LGBT market, PlanetOut's Gay.com website also compares favorably to mainstream websites by certain statistical measures. At more than 4 hours per month, the average time a user spends on Gay.com is better than all but one of the approximately 3,200 websites measured by Nielsen NetRatings in June 2004 including Yahoo!, eBay, MSN and Google. By delivering on its mission to "connect, enrich and illuminate gay and lesbian people everywhere," PlanetOut keeps members connected to and engaged on its sites with visitors returning to Gay.com almost every other day. (Nielsen NetRatings, June 2004)
On October 14, 2004, the week of National Coming Out Day, PlanetOut came out as a public company trading on the Nasdaq National Market under the ticker symbol "LGBT."
