Pink Media Blog & Articles

How much does it actually cost to reach LGBTQ+ consumers? Our new 2026 Media Kit puts audience, targeting, ad products, creative specs and published rates on one page — starting with a $495 one-week campaign with 10,000 guaranteed impressions, plus 28 city and region programs and 49 market verticals. Matt Skallerud on what’s inside, why owned and partner-reported numbers should be labeled separately, and five questions to ask of any LGBTQ+ media kit.

Does LGBTQ+ marketing belong in the multicultural budget or the general-market budget? Strategically, both. An ANA recap of GLAAD Media Institute’s Meghan Bartley argues that brands siloing inclusion campaigns are leaving scale — and trust — on the table. LGBTQ+ adults are roughly 9% of U.S. adults, and they live inside every Hispanic, Black, women’s, Gen Z, travel and entertainment plan. Matt Skallerud on GLAAD’s “movable middle,” why 81% of advertisers fear inauthentic ads more than exclusion, and how to make LGBTQ+ a layer across the whole plan.

Travel brands paid $36 per thousand impressions on Meta in Q2 2026; financial services paid $3.60. That’s a 10x spread, per EMARKETER, with Meta CPMs reportedly up 8% year over year. The priciest categories are exactly where LGBTQ+ consumers stand out: LGBTQ+ travelers book 7 experiences per trip versus 4, and 58% of LGBTQ+ adults delayed needed healthcare last year versus 38% of everyone else. Matt Skallerud on why the answer to rising media costs isn’t just cheaper impressions — it’s more meaningful ones.

In 2025, Equality Texas tracked more than 200 anti-LGBTQ+ bills in the Texas Legislature. That same year, Dallas scored a perfect 100 on HRC’s Municipal Equality Index — with no help from state law. Matt Skallerud on the paradox market of the South: Visit Dallas’s new LGBTQ+ Weekend campaign (two-steps at the Round-Up, drag at The Rose Room, banana pancakes at Lucky’s), the Dallas Voice, the Resource Center and Cathedral of Hope, the Black Tie Dinner two weeks out, a calendar that runs from TBRU in March to Halloween on Cedar Springs, and the seven rules for an eight-million-person market.

One month and $1,500 promoting Deborah Samuel’s memoir Grace Through Fire: 1,911 landing-page views at a 7.63% click-through rate, 2.8 times the benchmark, with 597 copies reported across September and October. Matt Skallerud on why the ad built on a Kirkus review led the way, and why the strongest book ad lets someone else make the case.

About 5.3 million LGBT adults in the U.S., 47% of the community, are religious. The Methodists voted 692–51 to welcome LGBTQ+ clergy and weddings, while Catholic welcome still varies parish to parish. Matt Skallerud on the five segments of LGBTQ+ people of faith, why welcome matters, and how congregations and brands can reach this audience with honesty and care.

Most LGBTQ+ targeting bought programmatically is a data segment laid over general-market inventory. The creators, podcasts, community publishers, regional radio and several of the largest LGBTQ+ apps that the community actually trusts are mostly not on the exchanges at all. Matt Skallerud on the #ILoveGay Network — 35+ partners planned and reported as one campaign — how Content as Advertising keeps creator content working 24/7, why layering apps and connected TV changes the reach curve, and what Revry’s 60M+ US households add to the plan.

Updated October 28. Two weeks and $500 into a Facebook and Instagram carousel for Palm Springs’ Purple Room: 16,519 impressions, 8,447 people reached, 657 link clicks and 582 ticket-page views at a 3.98% click-through rate — about 86 cents per ticket-page view. Nine upcoming performances are 70% sold, and The Judy Show on November 8 is sold out. Matt Skallerud on reading clicks and tickets side by side, and why the carousel now rolls into November instead of shrinking one show at a time.

Atlanta just wrapped the biggest six weeks on its LGBTQ+ calendar — and almost none of it happened in June. The world’s largest Black Pride draws 100,000+ every Labor Day, Out On Film runs into October, and Atlanta Pride brings roughly 350,000 people down Peachtree in October. All of it in a state with no LGBTQ+ non-discrimination law, from a city with a perfect HRC equality score for more than a decade. Matt Skallerud on the LGBTQ+ capital of the South: why Black queer Atlanta is the market rather than a segment of it, why corporate policy is civic policy in Georgia, the HIV frontline, the Georgia Voice, and the seven rules for brands that want to be trusted in 2027.

LGBTQ+ inclusion in major studio films fell to 23.6% in 2024, a three-year low, and 41% of LGBTQ+ TV characters won’t return next season. Yet 23% of U.S. adults under 30 now identify as LGBTQ+. Matt Skallerud on the 2026 LGBTQ+ viewer, the festival circuit and Outfest’s comeback, and four practical ways studios, streamers and distributors can win this audience.

Studios run reels for their releases every day. Most LGBTQ+ films never get that, so viewers only find them by typing “LGBTQ” into a streaming search bar. Matt Skallerud looks inside one LGBTQ+ streaming channel’s 440-title Amazon catalog — about 110 suppliers, with roughly 80 titles from the filmmakers themselves — explains how Meta’s 2022 targeting change made discovery harder, and lays out a practical way for distributors, streamers and indie filmmakers to show viewers where to watch.

Atlanta Pride, National Coming Out Day and Spirit Day all land in October, which makes it the best month to ask which brands actually kept investing in LGBTQ+ visibility after June. Matt Skallerud scores Delta, Huntington Bank, Coca-Cola, IHG, Marriott and other partners on four measures — sponsorship, content, advertising and continuity — and finds that sponsorship is easy to see while original LGBTQ+ content and paid LGBTQ+ media are nearly invisible. Not visible isn’t absent, but it is an opportunity, with nearly 3 in 4 LGBTQ+ consumers buying less from brands that pull back.

At the ANA’s cultural marketing forum on culture x gender, the numbers were blunt: multicultural audiences drive 100% of US population growth and about 44% of new consumers, yet got roughly 5% of investment in 2025–26 — and Collage Group found every one-point gain in cultural resonance lifts purchase intent 0.79%. Matt Skallerud on the layer most intersectional plans still leave out: with 23% of under-30s identifying as LGBTQ+ and women nearly twice as likely as men to do so, LGBTQ+ identity already runs through every culture and gender you’re targeting.

New York has Stonewall. Los Angeles has almost everything that came before it — the Mattachine Society in 1950, ONE magazine in 1953, the Black Cat protests in 1967 — plus the world’s first permitted Pride parade in 1970 and the largest LGBTQ+ organization on earth. And it never did any of it in one neighborhood. Matt Skallerud on marketing to the other capital of queer America: a polycentric, majority-Latino county of nearly ten million people, why bilingual is baseline, the refuge playbook California wrote, the industry that manufactures LGBTQ+ media for the world, three Prides in five weeks, and the Halloween audience almost nobody buys.

Folsom wrapped Sunday. Southern Decadence was four weeks ago — 250K–300K people and roughly $275M in one weekend. The LGBTQ+ event economy is enormous, and 2026 is the year its sponsorship side broke and started rebuilding. Gravity Research found 39% of companies cut Pride engagement in 2025 and not one planned to increase it. The bill came due this year: Phoenix Pride filed Chapter 11, Tucson Pride closed after nearly fifty years, NYC carried a $750K shortfall. But San Francisco Pride — down $300K when Comcast, Diageo and Anheuser-Busch walked — rebuilt with Philz Coffee and the SF Opera. Matt Skallerud on the loyalty ledger every segment of this audience is now keeping, the five attendee types, why water and charging stations beat step-and-repeats, and how to answer the question you’ll be asked: where were you in 2025?

“33 billion reasons to get our pronouns right.” During UK National Inclusion Week, Outvertising put the LGBTQIA+ business case on billboards from London to Edinburgh: £33 billion in spending power, a Gen Z twice as likely to be queer, and 65% of employees who’d leave a job where they couldn’t be out. New CEO Tash Beecher calls inclusive advertising “a commercial superpower for brands.” Matt Skallerud translates each poster into US terms — roughly $1.4 trillion in LGBTQ+ spending power and 23% of adults under 30 — and pulls out six things American brands can borrow from how the case was made.

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.