Dallas executive builds mini-empire with gay-targeted multimedia
Dallas movie executive Stephen Jarchow has made thousands of deals in his 17-year entertainment career, but none with more potential punch than his recent acquisition of a URL.
The 58-year-old chairman of Here Media Inc. bought gay.com, the preeminent Web site for gays and lesbians.
Through this Internet portal, Jarchow will offer online full-length movies, TV programming, magazines and fashion, travel and music information.
Gay.com will culturally and technically mesh with its new sister companies: HereTV, an online, cable and satellite service that reaches 54 million households, and Out and The Advocate, two alternative lifestyle magazines.
“As the result of this deal, we have become a unique company that straddles traditional distribution and digital distribution,” Jarchow says in his Preston Center office. “We own pretty much the entire media for the gay marketing space.”
Here Media is a publicly held – but delisted and unprofitable – company owned primarily by Jarchow and his longtime business partner, Paul Colichman, 49, who lives in Los Angeles.
They are building a gay-targeted multimedia mini-empire because they understand this largely affluent, well-educated minority group, believe advertisers want to tap into it and think other media companies don’t want to touch it.
“We intend to be the No. 1 place that advertisers go to reach a national gay audience,” Jarchow says. “Gay people buy a lot of everything. They tend to be fashion-forward, trendsetters and early technology adapters.”
Out, which has 75,000 paid subscribers and 75,000 who get it free, is filled with full-page ads for Calvin Klein, Louis Vuitton, DKNYMen, Continental Airlines and Subaru.
According to advertising industry figures, about 7 percent of Americans identify themselves as gay, lesbian or bisexual, and they represent $690 billion in buying power.
“The numbers bear up that this is a strong target market,” says Owen Hannay, principal of Dallas-based Slingshot LLC, which specializes in online marketing.
