Pink Media Blog & Articles

In January 2018, SCRUFF removed every third-party ad network from its apps and gave up roughly 20% of company revenue to do it — basement CPMs, 10% fill rates, malvertising, and a tracking-consent dialogue it didn’t want its own members to see. Eight years on, that decision is the product. Perry Street Software, independent since 2010 and the largest independent GBTQ+ publisher in the world, reaches 3M+ members monthly across SCRUFF and Jack’d in 180+ countries, sells every placement directly, and runs full-screen units with nothing else competing for the screen. Matt Skallerud on why this is one of the media partners we work with most closely, who should be buying it, what actually performs there, and why “brand safe” means something different when the publisher owns the whole page.

Three years of legislation aimed at one art form, and here’s the scoreboard: Drag Race Season 18 delivered the highest season premiere rating in franchise history, crowning Myki Meeks for $200,000 this April. 27 Primetime Emmys across the franchise, four active spinoffs, editions on four continents, roughly 500,000 in worldwide DragCon ticket demand, and $2M+ raised for the ACLU Drag Defense Fund. Matt Skallerud on the 2026 drag market: the five audiences most campaigns collapse into one, why the legal risk is far narrower than the headlines suggest — the courts gutted the scariest statute on the books — what booking a performer professionally actually means, and the eight rules that separate brands the community vouches for from the ones it warns each other about. Every wave of suppression has preceded a bigger boom.

Every few months a small business owner asks the same question — what does five hundred dollars actually buy? Our industry tends to dodge it, because the case studies that get published are the six-figure ones. So here’s a small one with the numbers left in: roughly $500 across Facebook and Instagram over 22 days, aimed at one metro area and one dated event. 20,432 impressions, 15,331 people reached, 1,369 link clicks, 917 landing page views and a 6.70% link click-through rate against a 1.93% industry benchmark — about 3.5x, with the top ad at 7.04%. Matt Skallerud on the $0.37 click, the $24.47 CPM, why 67% click-to-page follow-through matters more than the impression count, and the five things that made a small budget work. Small budgets don’t fail because they’re small. They fail because they’re spread thin.

In Florida, a perfect equality score is a plot twist. In New York it’s the least interesting fact about the market — and that tells you exactly how to market here. Roughly 750,000 LGBTQ+ adults across five boroughs with five separate Prides, two full media layers (local community press and the national outlets headquartered in the same zip codes), and institutions that have been doing the work since 1978. Matt Skallerud on why credentials don’t differentiate a brand in New York, why a Manhattan-only June activation is the most expensive way to be forgotten, and the seven rules for the capital of queer America. It needs you at the table — in February, in Queens, at the gala, on the ferry.

Everyone posted about the Heated Rivalry moment; almost nobody cited the data underneath it. Nielsen’s Rewriting the Rivalry measured who actually watches queer storytelling — 70% women for Heated Rivalry, 68% for The Hunting Wives and Call Me by Your Name, 81% for A League of Their Own and Harlem. The audience for queer content is not the queer population; the community is the loyal core, not the ceiling. Matt Skallerud on why that makes this a reach buy rather than a niche buy — plus 67% vs. 55% ad-supported streaming reach, a 32% vs. 21% purchase-intent gap created by the surround alone, and GLAAD’s “proven growth engine” framing for your 2027 deck.

Nielsen found LGBTQ+ audiences reached through influencer media are 47% more likely to buy influencer-endorsed products — and 52% more likely to buy when a brand advertises in content featuring diverse creators. Those aren’t the same finding. The 47% is an endorsement effect that needs a signed contract with every creator; the 52% is an adjacency effect you can buy as media across a whole network at once. The bigger number is the cheaper one. Matt Skallerud restates both for people who build media plans — plus why follower count is a misleading KPI when micro creators run 2–3x the engagement of macro ones, and the six questions we ask before putting any creator in front of a client.

LGBTQ+ marketing keeps getting cut because it keeps getting pitched as a campaign. Matt Skallerud makes the case for an audience strategy instead, built in three layers: cultural — participate where LGBTQ+ culture and your brand already intersect; community — distribute through publishers, creators, events and organizations that already hold trust; performance — let mainstream platforms handle broad conversion optimization while LGBTQ+ media supplies intentional reach and context. With 9% of US adults and 23% of Gen Z identifying as LGBTQ+, $1.4 trillion in annual spending, and 71.5% buying less from brands they perceive as retreating, presence beats packaging — and it’s a far easier yes than twelve months of rainbow creative.

They banned the books, and the books hit the bestseller lists. LGBTQ+ fiction moves about 4.4 million units a year — up roughly 200% since 2019, with queer romance growing 40% year over year — and all of that growth happened during the most aggressive censorship campaign in modern American publishing. Matt Skallerud on the ban paradox and what it means commercially: the ALA's 4,235 challenged titles in 2025 and the finding that 92% of challenges come from organized pressure groups rather than parents, the six reader segments most publishers collapse into one, why discovery here runs through BookTok and bookseller staff picks instead of paid media, the queer bookstore as embassy, and the one rule that matters — lead with the book, stand with the author. With Banned Books Week October 4–10 and LGBTQ History Month right behind it, October is the real season in this category.

The American gay-rights movement didn’t start in New York — it started in Chicago in 1924, when Henry Gerber chartered the Society for Human Rights, 45 years before Stonewall. Chicago built the first officially designated gay district in the country and runs the Midwest’s largest LGBTQ+ center and health system. Then Illinois became the only refuge state in the middle of the country. Matt Skallerud on why that makes Chicago the most under-bought LGBTQ+ market in America — one buy that reaches six states’ worth of community, a nonprofit newsroom worth partnering with, a second season in August and September that delivers Pride-scale attention outside June, and the seven rules for winning the heartland’s LGBTQ+ capital.

Destinations International and IGLTA launched Why Values Matter in May 2026 — a genuinely strong framework built on research with 1,800+ LGBTQ+ travelers and organized around three power values: Harmony, Health & Well-Being, and Balance. It reached 800+ member destinations. But step one, “strengthen marketing representation,” quietly assumes you have somewhere to run that marketing — and after Meta’s 2022 targeting removal and a Google policy that names “gay travel” as a restricted example, most destinations don’t. Matt Skallerud on why LGBTQ+ travel strategy is now abundant and free while channel access keeps getting scarcer, and the five things a destination has to build to close the gap.

The major platforms are getting exceptionally good at automated advertising while getting deliberately worse at letting an advertiser say “I want to reach LGBTQ+ consumers.” Meta removed sensitive-interest targeting on January 19, 2022 and has spent four years consolidating manual controls into AI-driven broad delivery. Google prohibits using your own customer list to promote sexual-orientation content — and names “gay travel” as an example. When Meta began personalizing ads from AI chat conversations in December 2025, it excluded orientation by design. Matt Skallerud on why the parameter is gone but the audience never moved, and the three assets that absorb the displaced value: first-party LGBTQ+ audiences, publishers and creators with known audience composition, and contextual LGBTQ+ media environments.

In 1996 Greater Fort Lauderdale spent $35,000 on its first LGBTQ+ marketing campaign. Today the destination draws roughly 3.4 million LGBTQ+ visitors a year spending an estimated $1.35 billion. Matt Skallerud on why that’s a strategy lesson rather than a feel-good statistic: a mature destination at capacity can’t grow on volume, so Fort Lauderdale changed the composition of its demand — trading 350,000 spring breakers for higher-yield, year-round, low-displacement travellers. Richard Gray spent thirty years building it at Visit Lauderdale, including the industry’s first transgender travel research study and the world’s first travel campaign featuring transgender models.

For twenty-five years, “are you LGBTQ+ friendly?” has been a question with no checkable answer. Australia just gave it one. The Australian Tourism Industry Council has folded Rainbow Ready Accreditation into its national Quality Tourism Framework — five assessment areas covering policy, operations, physical environment and marketing, guest information and staff training — co-developed with academics from Charles Sturt, the University of Queensland and Monash, and free for operators already holding Sustainable Tourism Accreditation. Matt Skallerud on why the structure matters more than the badge, why GALTA and Visit Gay Australia are the other half of the story, and the question US destinations should expect in their next RFP.

Three cities in Broward County — Fort Lauderdale, Wilton Manors and Oakland Park — each hold a perfect 100 on HRC’s Municipal Equality Index, and Wilton Manors is the second-gayest city in America by household density. All of it inside the state writing the anti-LGBTQ+ playbook. Matt Skallerud on why judging Greater Fort Lauderdale by Tallahassee’s headlines is one of the most expensive misreads in LGBTQ+ marketing right now — the community media that actually reaches this market, the institutions doing the work, a calendar that runs February, June and October, and the seven rules that govern South Florida.

"Brands pulled back from Pride" is imprecise enough to cost you money. Look at what actually got cut and the pattern is sharp: brands cut merchandise and rainbow logos far more than they cut parades, activations, donations and sponsorships. IKEA marched Pride through its own aisles. MAC ran a bus at NYC Pride. Sally Beauty handed out ice cream with no collection at all. Tinder and Diesel shipped a collab plus $200,000 to Outright International. Target cut shelf space. Matt Skallerud on the 2026 decoupling of retail SKUs from physical presence — plus new HRC data showing 71.5% of LGBTQ+ consumers buy less from brands they perceive as retreating, at twice the rate of everyone else — and what it means for splitting a 2027 budget between product tie-ins and media.

Every vertical got the same 2026 news cycle — they didn't all react the same way. CPG and retail got nervous about the merch and moved money off the shelf. Travel went the other direction: Destinations International and IGLTA shipped a formal LGBTQ+ tourism toolkit built on 1,800+ traveler interviews, and Pennsylvania's state tourism office launched "Sorry Not Sorry" on the record — framed against $83.9 billion in tourism impact and 514,261 jobs. Matt Skallerud on the three values that actually move a booking, why Pride sponsorship isn't the driver everyone assumes, and why a fractured country makes state and city marketing matter more than national.

Everyone quotes the $1.4 trillion LGBTQ+ consumer number. Almost nobody quotes the other side of the ledger: 1.4 million LGBTQ+-owned businesses contributing more than $1.7 trillion to U.S. GDP — with fewer than 1% certified. Matt Skallerud on the 2026 LGBTQ+ B2B market: the six audiences most campaigns collapse into one, why LGBTQ+ founders deliver 36% more jobs and 114% more patents on 0.5% of U.S. venture capital, how 534 employers held Equality 100 while Fortune 500 CEI participation fell 65%, and the August-to-October conference circuit that opens today in San Diego.

U.S. LGBTQ+ bars fell 45% between 2002 and 2023 — but lesbian bars bottomed at 21 and have roughly doubled since, The Sports Bra launched a whole new genre, and new third places open monthly. Matt Skallerud on the gay bar's comeback, the Absolut-vs-Bud Light lesson every beverage brand should study, the sober shift toward zero-proof, and why the brands that help keep the lights on aren't sponsors here — they're family.

Want to know if a brand's Pride support is real? Don't check June — check October. Matt Skallerud rounds up six brands with this-summer receipts: Dr. Bronner's foam tour to Atlanta Pride (Oct 10, with $100K/year to the ACLU through 2028), WorldPride Amsterdam (Jul 25–Aug 8, ~1M visitors), SWISS's year-round rainbow livery, Taiwan's SF-Pride-to-Taipei funnel (Oct 31), and Google and TikTok's creator programs built to outlast the month — proving Pink Media's "365, not just June" case. Strong #ILoveGay travel crossover.