We were contacted today by the founder of the soon to launch social network for gay men BigJock.com. It lead us to take a look around the gay male online social networking space and write the following overview of some of the current market leaders.
Niche social networks are likely a viable business because they allow specialized functionality and a subjective community feel as opposed to general interest sites that defer to either the lowest common denominator or the 15-25 year old demographic. Many people want to participate in social networks, but many people prefer networks set up for people they can relate to. That makes sense to me. From the proudly professional to the happily hedonistic, there may be something on this list for everyone – or at least everyone who’s a gay man.
As you can see by the following short profiles, these sites targeting a demographic with two traits in common (gay men) are all very different. Just as there’s a wide diversity of gay men in the world, there may well be ample room for a variety of gay male social networking sites – presuming they are able to build sufficient critical mass for monetization and financial viability.
I won’t pretend to speak for gay men and I’m sure there are some sites I’m missing, but these appear to be the most talked about gay male social networking sites online. You can take or leave my reviews of them. Maybe they’ll be a look inside a niche market for some of our readers and maybe they’ll be links of love for others. I tried to note the ones where the guys were particularly hot.
Jake
Jake calls itself the world’s largest gay professional community. It’s very British. The company reports almost 30,000 members sending two million messages to each other over the past year and attending exclusive real world events together. Unlike others that discourage independent commercial activity, this site encourages users to advertise their own businesses and directly monetize their involvement with the site.
There’s a professional but stylish look and feel to Jake. Users are encouraged to use their real names and free accounts offer only two photos – one for yourself and one for your company’s logo for example.
Paid accounts are £10 per month. Paid members can access the dating section of the site, get more storage in their internal mailboxes, get priority invitations to real world events and bring guests, gain access to “business briefings” and a number of other things.
ManJam
ManJam is probably the most widely discussed of all of these social networking sites. It calls itself “a unique social network” but in fact it’s just one of many similarly branded copycat sites from JuxMedia Ltd. ManJam offers listings for rooms and houses for rent or to live in rent-free. There are listings from all around the world. There are job and business listings, many of which are in the Middle East. There are personal profile listings with text and video comments enabled for members. Free membership gets users access to rental listing details, IM, video and audio messaging. There is also a mobile component to ManJam. Profiles on this site support transgendered identities.
Premium members get entries in any of the categories moved up to the top of their respective listings. Paid accounts are $20 per month, $42 per quarter or $90 per year. This site looks solid enough and usability is decent, though I did get one 404. It doesn’t have the upper class affects of Jake.com but ManJam is hardly for low baggers either. If hot unclothed chests are what you are looking for then ManJam may be where you want to go.
Ohlalaguys
Ohlalalguys is a rebranded version of JuxMedia’s ManJam with even worse site navigation added. See also Bentlads, another one of these sites.
Lovetastic
Lovetastic is explicitely not for men looking to hook up with hunks of burning love. “Finally, gay personals that treat you like a person,” the site says. Lovetastic says its goal is to bring together husbands. It used to be called Scene404 and the old landing page is pretty cute, in a dorky kind of way.
Free account holders can post profiles, browse the site and receive messages. Paid accounts, starting at $6 per month, enable users to send messages and chat.
Lovetastic’s interface is the cleanest, simplest and easiest on the eyes of any of these sites. In some ways it’s got more class than any of them. There are randomly generated interview questions for profiles and nude or shirtless pictures are prohibited. The site is ad free. If this is the site for you, you’ll likely know as soon as you visit it.
Connexion
Connexion is LGBT online networking with a .org suffix. In addition to dating and events organizing the site focuses on low level political activity and news. There’s an RSS feed for news from the site. The site is a little awkward but not highly sexualized. Transgendered identity is supported on this site but not gender queer identities outside of those based on the Male/Female binary.
There aren’t paid memberships available for this nonprofit site but there are a handful of very unobtrusive ads. If you’re looking for news and political discussion in your LGBT social networking check out Connexion.
OutEverywhere
OutEverywhere is a paid service for men and women in select countries around the world. It is very text intensive, site navigation is unbearable. This site has an emphasis on promoting real world events and venues. I couldn’t handle looking at it very much but there is a tag cloud if you scroll way down on the front page! Memberships are £19.95 for 6 months with a 28 free trial period.
DList
DList looks like it was designed by someone from Gawker – in fact I’m sure it was. It’s a pretty straightforward social networking site with a good feature set. User blogs, topical site blogs to read, a music player on profile pages. It’s ad supported without premium accounts.
Without seeing more of what the community is like on DList, I imagine this site will be succeed if it can keep its costs down. It’s got all the basics taken care of and is attractive.
BigJock
The site that inspired this post, BigJock, will launch its full featured version on early next month. The version that’s already up looks very nice though. It will include all the basics plus a Hot or Not picture rating component. The site will be free and ad supported. You can sign up now for an account and enter to win an iPod. BigJock has a long way to go before it can compete with the heavyweights above, but anything is possible and there are clearly niche approaches underway throughout the gay male social networking market. And that monkey logo is not to be missed.
Is this how you and Michael met? This helps explain the dorm-like, all male situation at the Arrington ranch, not that there’s anything wrong with it…
One word. “Ewww!…”
Now, we want a review of lesbian dating sites too!
Ali, that’s a great idea – please leave any suggestions you have for sites to look at.
Ditto what Ali stated. Unfortunately, I have no suggestions…
This is just what I needed! Thank you again, TechCrunch
Ah you forgot GayRomeo.com (based in Amsterdam, NL) – it’s free, available in six languages, they have a nice and feature-rich interface and 400.000 users after all.
Lipstick lesbians only, PLEASE!
Why can’t some one just start a niche “group” on Orkut or other similar site. How different is that from developing a totally exclusive site ?
India:
Three words: “Money, money, money”.
Ew? Lipstick lesbians only? Seriously?
Come on folks, please don’t tell me all the readers of this board are 12 years old.
noticeably missing from your list is downelink.com. in a nutshell i would describe it as and even more niche gay social networking site catering to gay asian men. of course that’s not to say that anybody is excluded. I would say its pretty popular in California, but as a user stats are not available to me.
What does this mean: “Transgendered identity is supported on this site but not gender queer identities outside of those based on the Male/Female binary.”? Seriously.
Marshall – bet you really had fun reviewing these sites mate haha
You forgot Gaydar.co.uk. It’s been around for aaaaaaaaaages… Waaaaay before the social-networking bubble we’re going through. And it’s not only popular in the UK, it’s the most used gay hook-up site world-wide.
It’s interface is a bit dated and messy, and they should really get rid of the paid functionality and develop an ad-supported business model, though.
When a site calls itself “ManJam” I can’t help but laugh.
For some reason when I read this post I had “Its Raining Men” stuck in my head; just like that old skit on In Living Color.
Can’t wait for the lesbian review. I am sure the reviews for Vagmasters, Vagster, and Vagerati will be titilating.
GuyParty.com is a gay social network!!!
Seee http://gaysocialnetworks.com/ for a full list of gay dating and social network sites.
This is just wonderful. What’s next? NAMBLA social networking sites? How about some polygamy social networking sites? But like others have said, let’s have some equal time for the lesbian social networking sites.
“Hated it!”
Slow news day, today?
Nice article.. i’m a lesbian girl myself, here in Denmark we have some very very nice sites for guys and lesbians.. very 2.0ish.. the one for guys is called http://www.flyguys.dk, and the one for girls is called http://www.flygirls.dk – i don’t know if they exists in an international version.
Skeptic – But for the money they really aren’t solving any other problem.
I dont understand why there needs to be so many options. Not just for gay\lesbian social networking … but for everything else. For the most part, they are all the same. Some may look nicer than others, but they offer the same features. Myspace is so popular becuase… because its so popular! All they had some right is to become popular with a few people, then the viral growth took over.
Whether it is niche social networking, ajax homepages, user-generated news, or an online office suite… If none of these sites stand out from the crowd, what makes them all think they can survive?
We also reviewed the UK gay social netwroking site QueensSpeech a few months ago. http://uk.techc...e-queensspeech/
It doesn’t suprise me that there are so many GAY social networks. They are all chasing the “pink pound” as we call it in the UK which has a very strong advertising pull behind it. i.e advertisers of potentially gay related products have realised this community is very lucrative and also very tight-knitted and will certainly recommend good products to each other.
Sites like the QueensSpeech are going to do very well in getting their share of this advertising money IF they can build a community quickly.
Thank you so much for this post. It really encourages me that some people can get past the useless stereotypes and bigotry to realize that we’re all just people. Niche markets should be interesting to anyone who likes making money… Thank you, Marshall.
I wanted to see The ManHole. I think its a great name for a Gay Place.
Its pretty messed up that some of these reviewed websites have membership fees. OutEverywhere’s £19.95 for 6 months sounds like a rip-off. Wouldn’t this deter gay men and cause them to join gay social groups on MySpace, Facebook, etc?
@Amit:
People are willing to pay for it, if you can guarantee that there are no fakers and the scene / community is real. Interesting list.
LOL Marshall,
Thanks for this.
=/
Interesting.. You have made a statement there for TechCrunch that there is no place for bias in your reviews. Way to go!
alternative culture is the net.
You forgot cottaging.co.uk we\’re UK dedicated social network for gay guys seeking intimate encounters… also gaydar which is the largest in the UK by miles.
xx
Phoenix – we’re all about bias at techcrunch, we just don’t happen to have a sexual orientation bias.
From the looks of it, the BigJock website is the only “true” social network in that it costs nothing, unlike most of those mentioned, and it will have all the regular stuff….and the monkey is very cool, I love the tank top!
I think it’s pretty obvious that Marshall and Mike are both straight. They also missed a subtly named site called gay.com
You also forgot gayther.com which is the international version of rezog.com, the biggest gay social network in France.
It’s widely free, and more than 25 000 members sends 400 000 messages to each other daily.
Site navigation is really great ! the french experience of the “minitel” ?
There’s one kind a new and recently launched called Uniformen.co.uk.
Not many users there, though.
Fridae.com >160k members.. beats all the websites profiled here…
yup, Gaydar is missing, very popular everywhere.
re gay.com and gaydar exclusion: I just reviewed what is being tgalked about right now in blogs and tags – both of these would have been good and will include them in the future. thanks
Interesting to see how people are confused between a dating site (the gay leaders are gay.com and gaydar.co.uk) and a social network site like Jake.org
Social Networks and dating sites grew out of online communities. So what makes a social network and what makes a dating site? Features? Positioning? Target market?
As anyone managed to get laid using LinkedIn yet?
By the way, Mike, your rainbow flag is not very 2.0
The current one only has 6 stripes (http://en.wikip...ki/Rainbow_flag).
And there’s my little baby, http://www.thingbox.com/
It’s possibly the largest Ruby On Rails-based community site anywhere. How much more Web 2.0 do you want?
You forgot to mention http://www.manhunt.net, it is more of a dating/hookup site, but it is probably the most successful of all of them out there.
@41 And the fact that it’s based on Ruby On Rails means…..what? to the end user?
The website Big Jock looks like it uses phpFox. Hundreds of sites use phpFox which is a very limited and buggy software. For only $39.99 a month anyone can have a social network… not sure that a review of this social network is merited in Techcrunch.
It means from a team of 1 person working in their spare time, they get more features from a free to use site quicker than teams of 7 or 8 working full time and charging subscription fees.
So after looking at such a vast number of gay sites, is it really worth launching another one?
Apart from Jake no traffic numbers are mentioned, it’d be interesting to see if any of these sites get any kind of traction or they are just “coming out” to make whatever money is left to be made…..
I didn’t know there where so many
there is also http://gaybrunch.com
hey maybe we can hooke up and u can play with my sexy caveman ass than ill stick it in your asss
Thingbox has around 5000 members. 30 million page views since launch just under 18 months ago, and around 900,000 private messages sent. And about 600,000 forum postings.
Of course, there is Gay.com