Many thanks to "Anon4" for his comment about new info on the gay.com merger with here! During yesterday's conference call with stockholders they presented where the new executives want to take the company in the future. You can see the "slides" used during the call which include some mockups of what the new new gay.com may look like by clicking here. The plan seems to tap synergies between their social networking sites and their programming from here! I'm still not sure how their print publications fit into it all, except maybe for source material for online services and guaranteed print advertising for online services. Gay.com seems to be an established online audience for the programming they're already selling via "subscription video-on-demand" through most cable providers.
Hopefully the Here Media revamp of the site will learn from the mistakes made by the PlaneOut management. The fact that Hulu is already out there with a working business plan and growing audience (including fun programming like "Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog") helps ease my fears.
A positive indication is that the new executives are getting a $1.00 salary for the first year (although we don't know at the moment what salary they've been guaranteed for future years). And I'm not sure what they will really be able to accomplish within that first year. These things take time.
One thing I don't comprehend is how they can offer current PlanetOut shareholders this "Special Stock in Here Media [the new merged company] which provides certain limited downside protection of $4.00 per share value." My knowledge of this sort of thing is pretty limited, but this sounds like they're going to guarantee that this special stock will never be less than $4.00 per share, which seems strange for a stock that's lately been under 40 cents a share. Also the current PlanetOut shareholders will own 20% of the new company, while current here! owners will get 80%. It takes a lot more math to wrap your head around all of this than my poor little brain can handle at the moment. I'm trying to figure out how many common shares (or fractions of a share) of the new company I would get for each share I currently own in PlanetOut. How many shares of the "special stock?"
Makes my poor little head hurt.
And, sadly, until Here Media can fix gay.com we're stuck with a site that requires enormous amounts of "scheduled maintenance" when it isn't having an "unplanned outage." Maybe, maybe PLEASE, they'll release an API that lets 3rd-party programmers develop their own chat programs that work with gay.com, even if they do so on a simpler level specifically designed to ease the load on their servers.
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Check out this conference call in their SEC filings.
I am wondering what is taking so long for PlanetOut's latest quarterly filings to be available. I am sure they will gloss over their problems just like this conference call transcript does.
If this merger happens, someone seriously needs to consider starting some independent LGBT media outlets...do we really want here! media to have a monopoly on LGBT news and entertaintment?
There's still LOGO as an alternate cablecaster. Wolfe Video and TLA Releasing are still doing a fine job releasing indie LGBT films on DVD. Strand Releasing distributes a lot of "bigger" (but still indie) films on DVD. I don't think that here! will be anything close to a monopoly.
Based on what I have read in PlanetOut's SEC filings, Here Media will probably take much better care of gay.com than its current management. The people running Here Networks/Regent seem to have better business sense than PlanetOut's executives. They at least recognize how valuable the chat system is.
Anon4, I completely agree. They certainly seem to have a "progressive" approach to the merger and the future; looking at the ways the print, video and online media are becoming so intertwined (without getting bogged down in things like a cruise line) although they haven't said anything about the "chat" aspect of gay.com, which concerns me. And, yes, the current PlanetOut CEO did seem to really gloss over the HUGE problems they've had with the website redesign, pretending that their level of problems is within norms for such an undertaking when it has been a total disaster. As for when we'll see the latest quarterly filings, well, I'm the first to admit I'm ignorant of such things, but it wouldn't surprise me if we don't see them until after the merger is complete so that the LGBT stock doesn't have a chance to dive any lower than it already is.
And, while I'm thinking about it, thanks for being such a well-informed, insightful participant here. It is greatly appreciated.
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