A colleague of mine asked ‘what is the gayest site on the web?’ With June being Gay Pride month throughout the US and the World, I thought it was a valid question. Apparently I have the street cred to answer this question without being a poser, but I didn’t know a lot about the top LGBT sites, so I jumped into the Compete data to explore. The sites I reviewed include global portals, social networks, entertainment, news, politics and more. So, what is the gayest site?

Surprise! (not). Gay.com, a global portal, is the ‘gayest’ site based on people (i.e. unique visitors), pageviews, visits, and attention. Although gay.com has stayed on top for the last year, it has lost people share as the volume of LGBT sites has expanded within this segment. In fact, if you include gay personals sites, outpersonals.com is the largest site within the LGBT segment, attracting nearly 1M visitors/month, and topping gay.com since Pride 2006.

I found that the volume of visitors doesn’t tell the whole story about the most influential LGBT sites. For instance, Connexion.org, a site for social networking, not even listed in the top 10 above, jumps to number 2 for the amount of attention (a blended metric of visitors and time spent on the site) users pay to the site. What does that mean? It means if you want to market to people in the LGBT segment, your best dollars are spent on connexion.org in addition to gay.com. In fact, connexion.org users have an average stay on site which competes with gay.com.

We get an entirely different picture of top LGBT sites if we look at monthly velocity of attention over the last year. I noticed that towleroad.com has some spectacular spikes in velocity compared to other sites. Tracking the relative change in attention on these sites since June 2006, it becomes apparent why towleroad.com was the winner of the 2006 Weblog of the Year at the Gay Bloggies. Showing a 300% attention growth since June 2006 or even crazier, 4,600% attention growth since March 2006, towleroad.com dominates the velocity statistics compared to other sites.

Congratulations to these web pioneers. We wish everyone a happy Pride Month.

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