They Turned Off the Ad Networks. Eight Years Later, That's the Whole Pitch.

I want to start with a decision that, in eighteen years of watching digital publishers make choices about money, still strikes me as remarkable.

In January 2018, SCRUFF removed every banner slot from its app and stopped selling its inventory programmatically. Not reduced. Not tightened up the blocklist. Removed. At the time, third-party ad network revenue accounted for roughly 20% of the company's revenue, and they gave it up.

CEO Eric Silverberg's summary of the upside, given to AdExchanger at the time, was about as unsentimental as it gets: "Now we don't have to split revenue 60/40 with yet another ad network." The reasons underneath it were the ones every publisher knows and most tolerate — CPMs in the basement, fill rates from some networks as low as 10%, malvertising, and GDPR consent flows that meant showing members a tracking dialogue the company didn't feel good about putting in front of them.

That last one is the part I keep coming back to. A lot of publishers ran the same math in 2018. Almost none of them weighed "what does this consent screen look like to a gay man opening this app in a country where being gay is illegal" as a line item. SCRUFF did, and then acted on it.

What "No Third-Party Networks" Actually Buys an Advertiser

Most conversations about brand safety in app inventory are really conversations about the supply chain. When a client's team says they're nervous about mobile app advertising, what they usually mean — once you get past the first sentence — is that they don't know who else is on the page, they don't know where the impression was resold, and they don't know what their data does after the bid request leaves the building.

A publisher that sells every placement itself takes most of that off the table by construction. On SCRUFF and Jack'd there is no second advertiser in the auction, because there is no auction. The core unit is a full-screen placement paired with an inbox alert — you get the entire screen at the moment of delivery, and then a message sits waiting in the app afterward. The publisher's own description of the environment is "no third-party ad networks competing for attention," and that is a literal statement of architecture rather than a positioning line.

What that's worth in practice: a full-screen unit on a clean app is not competing with eleven other tiles for a fraction of a second of attention. It is the moment. Our clients consistently see the difference in engagement, and the creative gets to breathe in a way display inventory almost never allows.

A Publisher, Not a Marketplace

The company behind SCRUFF is Perry Street Software, and its self-description is worth quoting because it's accurate: the largest independent GBTQ+ publisher worldwide. Independent is the operative word. Founded in 2010 by Johnny Skandros and Eric Silverberg, who is still CEO, it has never been folded into a larger dating conglomerate. In 2019 it acquired Jack'd, putting two of the world's largest GBTQ+ communities under one roof, and it now reaches more than three million members a month across the pair. SCRUFF passed its fifteenth anniversary last year.

I've been doing this since GayWired launched in 1995, and I've watched a lot of queer media get bought, flattened and quietly wound down. A publisher that has stayed independent for sixteen years, kept its founder in the chair and is still shipping community features is not a common thing. It's also, from a planning standpoint, a practical thing: decisions get made by people you can actually reach, and campaign approvals don't route through four layers of a parent company that has never thought about this audience.

The Reach Includes Places Nothing Else Reaches

180+ countries is the headline number, and it's easy to skim past. Don't. A meaningful share of those markets have no LGBTQ+ press, no Pride media, no community publication a brand could buy even if it wanted to — and in some of them, being identifiably queer carries real legal risk.

For a destination marketing organization or a travel brand, this is the point. The gay traveler researching where to go next is on this app, in a market you have no other way to reach, in a moment when he is specifically thinking about elsewhere. SCRUFF has leaned into that since it launched Venture in 2015 — destination browsing, local event listings and a network of destination ambassadors built right into the app — alongside traveler alerts flagging countries that criminalize homosexuality. Travel isn't a bolt-on category here. It's load-bearing.

The Privacy Record Predates the Industry's Interest in Privacy

Perry Street lists four pillars — privacy first, safety by design, belonging for all, excellence in engineering — and the receipts run back further than the current fashion for saying so:

I raise all of this for a reason that isn't sentimental. When a health system, a public-health campaign or a pharma brand asks us where they can run, the first question their compliance team asks is about data handling. The number of LGBTQ+ app environments where the honest answer is "the publisher removed the trackers themselves, eight years ago, at their own expense" is very short.

What Performs Here — and What Doesn't

Who Should Be Buying This

Five categories where I'd put SCRUFF on the plan without much debate:

Destinations and DMOs. Global footprint, a built-in travel layer, and an audience actively planning trips. If you market a destination to gay and bi men, this is close to a default line item.

Health and public health. Clinics, health systems, PrEP and sexual-health campaigns, vaccination drives. The Poz community and the app's long record on health topics mean the message doesn't land as an intrusion, and the privacy posture makes the compliance review survivable.

Entertainment and streaming. Premieres, tours, festivals, specials. Full-screen is a trailer frame, and the inbox alert gives you a second touch on a date-driven campaign.

Hospitality and spirits. Hotels, bars, restaurant groups, beverage brands. Geo-targeting against a specific city on a specific weekend is the whole play, and it works.

D2C and retail. Grooming, apparel, wellness, subscription. The category the direct-sales shift was explicitly built to serve, and the one where full-screen creative has the most room to sell something properly.

Why I'm Writing About a Media Partner at All

Because the decision at the center of this is worth more attention than it got.

In 2018 an independent queer publisher looked at a supply chain that was paying it badly, tracking its members, occasionally serving them malware, and requiring a consent screen it found embarrassing — and it turned the whole thing off. That cost real money. Eight years later the industry has spent a fortune rediscovering that clean, direct-sold, first-party inventory is worth more, and SCRUFF has simply been sitting there with it the entire time.

We place campaigns there because they work. But I'd flag the company for a second reason: when brands ask me who in LGBTQ+ media has actually held the line on the audience's interests rather than talking about it, this is one of the examples I use.