PlanetOut

» see planetout.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

in october 2004 i was a university student in ankara with no opinion about the nasdaq and no reason to have one. PlanetOut was on it that month, listed under the ticker LGBT, and that is the fact that made me want to write this one down. A company walked into a stock exchange and used four letters of its own listing as a statement.

Tom Rielly built it in august 1995, and it did not launch on the open web. It launched as a forum on the Microsoft Network, with a second presence on AOL, which is how a lot of things started in that specific year. In april 1996 it closed three million dollars from Sequoia Capital and AOL. September 1996 is when it moved onto the web properly. By january 1997 Sequoia had pulled out and Rielly was back running it himself for a stretch.

In december 2000 the company behind Gay.com, Online Partners.com, agreed to buy PlanetOut, and the merged thing became PlanetOut Partners. That gave one owner both of the big american gay web properties. In november 2005 it bought LPI Media, the publisher of the Advocate and Out, which meant the magazines that had been the print record of that world since the sixties now belonged to a website.

The part i can describe is the balance sheet. What it was like to open PlanetOut from a bedroom in a town where nobody was going to say any of this out loud, i cannot tell you, same as with Gay.com. i can read the filings. The filings are not the thing.

~ the dossier ~

~ the ticker ~

It joined the nasdaq on 14 october 2004 under LGBT. No company aimed squarely at a gay audience had been traded on a major american exchange before, and the whole pitch to investors was that a defined audience is worth more per head than a general one. It had 131 employees and two websites that people actually opened every day.

For about eighteen months the pitch held. Then the ad market it was selling into stopped needing a specialist.

~ the unraveling ~

2006 closed with a net loss of 3.7 million dollars on 68.6 million of revenue. The core problem was ordinary and fatal: PlanetOut sold banner ads and paid personals in the exact years when MySpace and then Facebook made both of those free for anyone with a browser. A general network with a profile field does not need to charge you for the specialized version.

In april 2008 it announced it was selling the publishing division to Regent Releasing, so the Advocate and Out went out the door less than three years after coming in. What was left was two websites and a listing the company could no longer justify.

~ what really happened ~

Shareholders approved the merger on 10 june 2009 and it completed on the sixteenth. PlanetOut, Here Networks and Regent Entertainment Media became Here Media, run by Paul Colichman and Stephen P. Jarchow. The stock was at 38 cents when nasdaq took it off the board.

The terms tell you how the five years went. PlanetOut holders got one share of Here Media common stock and one share of a special class for each share they held, ending with a fifth of the common and all of the special. Neither class was listed on any exchange or quoted anywhere. The company that had made a point of being publicly traded ended by handing its owners paper that could not be sold. Gay.com and planetout.com kept running under the new owner for years after that, which is a different story from the one that ended in june.

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