Pink Media Blog & Articles

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.

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.