Arts & Ideas: All gay, all the time
"Certain aberrations also make sense," Lindstrom says. "Basketball, related to the WNBA perhaps, has a much greater following among lesbians than women as a whole."
"I hope Logo doesn't get caught in the trap of thinking all gay people are between 20 and 30 and live in urban areas," says OpusComm President Jeffrey Garber. "You want to program to your largest target audience. People in their 30s and 40s are at home more and can afford premium cable. If you focus too much on the MTV crowd, you lose potential."
And snagging as many viewers as possible is of course key—both for Here! and Q, which rely on subscribers, and Logo, which needs to convince advertisers that gays and lesbians are tuning in. Getting advertisers at all may be a struggle for the Viacom-owned network, given that companies have been traditionally reluctant to deal with the backlash that comes from supporting gay enterprises. But there are already a number of big names on board, including Orbitz, Subaru, Motorola, and Miller Lite.
As a business model, selling to gay America is a no-brainer, Colichman says.
"It's rare that the wealthiest niche is underserved," he observes. The officially gay networks may just be popping up now, but the fact that gay audiences are an attractive crowd hasn't been lost on other networks, particularly Showtime, which airs Queer as Folk and The L Word, two programs that have been particularly successful in the gay community for their characters and themes. Bravo topped the list of cable networks in the OpusComm study, which comes as no surprise to the home of Queer Eye as well as arts programming. "Gay culture leads to trends, and that's a de facto piece of Bravo," explains network President Lauren Zalaznick.
"The LGBT audience is the sweet spot. They have high levels of education and income and they're high entertainment consumers," says Kirk Iwanowski, senior vice president of marketing for the Sundance Channel, which mostly shows independent films. "We have actively pursued that audience since we launched." That's part of why Sundance just formed a partnership with gay.com, one of the most popular websites among gay men, and has made a commitment to creating original programming with gay-themes.
The more gay images on television, the merrier, Romine says.
"The existence of BET doesn't mean there shouldn't be African-American programming on other networks," he adds.
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