Hello everyone, welcome to the next lecture in the course. In the last lecture, we discussed and concluded the topic platforms used for remote sensing observations. We discussed about several kinds of platforms and we concentrated more on the satellite based platforms where we discussed the commonly used satellite orbit such as the geostationary orbit, near polar orbit, near polar sun synchronous orbit and all. Also, we have discussed how near satellites in the near polar orbit can achieve global coverage by staggering the orbital trace the satellite does on the earth every time by staggering it we are able to achieve a global coverage. So, today we are going to start a new topic called LIDAR. So, LIDAR is primarily a developed as like a surveying technique in order to measure the coordinates of points, but in recent years maybe like a decade or two, it has been used very widely for various applications including vegetation monitoring and so on. So, it is one of the important topic in remote sensing, but here we are not going to discuss it elaborately, rather we will talk in brief about LIDAR its principles and so on. And interested users or interested readers can refer to some other sources like some papers I have cited in the lecture slides during the course, I will provide like few other websites which you can look upon for additional information and so on. So, all these things you can like look up those who are really interested to do further research on the topic. Here in this course we will get just briefly introduced to the concepts of LIDAR. So, what LIDAR is? LIDAR is an acronym it stands for light deduction and ranging that is here the term is very similar to radar right. So, there in radar what we have seen we use microwave signals or originally it was like radio waves which was used for deduction and ranging of different objects. Here we employ similar concepts, but we use laser light for measuring the distances and detecting objects and that is why the name LIDAR light deduction and ranging it is again an active remote sensing method. In LIDAR 2 we will generate the wavelength we need, we will transmit it towards the target, get the backscatter signal back here also we are talking about backscattering whatever we send it has to come back to the same sensor in the same direction. So, backscattering only we are talking about. So, whatever is coming back we use that to range the distance between the objects and map them and also to infer some of its properties. And primarily LIDAR developed as a tool for engineering survey purposes like those students coming in from like a civil engineering background or like earth science background would have done some courses on engineering surveying where our primary aim will be to map the relative position of various points on the earth surface like with respect to your station where your instrument escape you will try to measure the coordinates of different objects surrounding you. Or with respect to like a boundary or with respect to some sort of like control points relative to that we will try to measure the x, y, z coordinates of other points. So, LIDAR primarily developed or came into use in the field of like geomatics for that particular purpose. We use it for like surveying applications and it first started its use in terrestrial instruments. So, like total stations, electronic distance magnetic measurement, they are like different ways in which we use electromagnetic signals for engineering surveying purposes. LIDAR also came into picture like that we use laser light for ranging the objects. Slowly people understood the advantages of LIDAR and it developed into different platforms like now LIDAR is available or LIDAR observations are available not only from terrestrial scanners but also from airborne platforms as well as satellite platforms. And now LIDAR has moved from just being like a survey technique from like a independent remote sensing technique where we not only measure the coordinates of points but we also try to get other useful information about the objects. We will see toward the end of this particular lecture, this particular topic. So, LIDAR is basically a ranging device. It measures the distance between the transmitter and the object that is in front of it or that is below it. If it is airborne platform, whatever the object is below it, it will measure the range. Essentially, it is a ranging device. So, it will measure the three-dimensional coordinates. Finally, that is what we will get. So, how we will get three-dimensional coordinates anyway just measures the distance which is like a one-dimensional distance like this. If the platform is aircraft is flying like this, it will just measure the distance in this particular axis. So, how we are going to translate that into a three-dimensional coordinate that we will see and also LIDAR came into use pretty long ago like into surveying into ground-based surveying LIDAR was beginning to be used few decades back. But in order for it to be used properly for airborne surveying or space-borne remote sensing surveying and remote sensing purposes, other technologies had to mature which actually prolonged the arrival of LIDAR technology in into airborne and space-borne platforms. So, essentially LIDAR cannot work independently. If you want a perfect three-dimensional coordinates of earth's surface features, we need to use LIDAR in combination with other technologies such as GNSS, a global navigation satellite system. And we need to have like an IMU like initial measurement unit and so on. So, that is the main reason why it took some time for LIDAR technology to mature and come into existence for remote sensing purposes through airborne and space-borne platforms. Also, LIDAR since it is like light-based ranging system, we use wavelengths in green band or NIR band. Traditionally, it is I told it is like a laser light. So, characteristically laser lights are monochromatic collimated beam of light. That is like if you take our normal white light what we get from sun or we get from our electric tube lights or whatever we use, it is not like properly monochromatic. They can come from like, they will have like a mix of wavelengths that we have already seen like white light composed of 7 different colors or 3 primary colors basically. But laser light are monochromatic. So, whenever we generate laser light, we will ensure that the light comes out in a single wavelength or a frequency. So, practically we may not get like an extremely single frequency, but we will have like a very narrow bandwidth. But for all practical purposes, we can assume it to be like a single wavelength. Plus it is collimated beam of light. Collimated means like all the laser pulses that are coming out will be like parallel to each other, will be perfectly coming in kind of like a straight line like the divergence. Say if you switch on a torch light, that light diverges very fast, whereas for a laser beam, if this is highly collimated, the divergence will be very narrow. Like as an example, say if you have like a torch light here, the light may suddenly spread like this. They are non-collimated, divergence may be large. But for a laser pulse or like a laser light, which is like highly collimated, the light may come out like this and the divergence will be very narrow. Divisions will be there, but it will be very narrow when we compare this with our normal light. So, here we use monochromatic collimated light source that is laser beams for as the medium of remote sensing. And conventionally, green wavelength roughly about 532 nanometers or NAR wavelength roughly 1064 nanometers, like 1.064 micrometers or 0.53 to micrometers. They are like the conventionally used wavelengths for laser remote sensing or LiDAR remote sensing. Basically, for land surfaces remote sensing, NAR may produce like a very high reflectance. So, that is why like NAR is often produced, like whatever be the feature, whether it is vegetation or bare soil, etc. NAR traditionally has like a higher reflectance, that is one. And also green wavelength, among vegetation green again can produce like higher reflectance compared to other visible wavelengths. Okay. So, basically green, if you look at like land surface, green or NAR typically has higher reflectance among its counterparts. If you look at visible, green will have slightly higher reflectance than others, like red and blue visible wavelengths. Similarly, NAR typically has high wavelengths, that is one thing. And in very rare cases, in some selected airborne platforms, 1550 nanometers, which is like a short wave infrared frequency that is also used. But more conventionally, green wavelength or NAR wavelength is widely used for LiDAR remote sensing purposes. So, how basically a LiDAR system works? We will first start with a terrestrial laser scanner, then we will move on to airborne systems and briefly have a look at space bond systems. So, first this picture on the left is a schematic representation of terrestrial laser scanner. Terrestrial means from ground, like the instrument that produces and transmits laser will be fixed in the ground. So, from this particular instrument, it will be sending in short pulses of laser, like while discussing about radar, we saw like radar, the antenna will send in short pulses of radar. Similarly, here also it will send in short pulses of laser light. There are some systems which transmits continuous waves but not very often used. Mostly we will discuss about this pulsed laser system but continuous laser transmission is also possible. But for our discussions, we will restrict ourselves to pulsed laser. So, it will send in or the instrument will transmit short pulses of laser and whatever object is present in front of it, this pulse will be reflected back. So, once this pulse is reflected back, the instrument can measure the distance between the instrument station and the target. So, this will produce the ranging in this particular line. Also, if the instrument is able to scan in the entire hemisphere surrounding it, say if I look from the top view, this is like the instrument location. So, if you look it from the top, instrument can potentially scan in all the 360 degree angles surrounding it. Normally like when we do ground based surveying using like a total station or something that instrument is able to rotate in the horizontal plane for the entire 360 degrees. Same thing is applicable with LIDA sensor too. It can rotate freely in 360 degrees. Similarly, it can rotate in the vertical plane from a horizontal to like vertical like this. So, it can rotate in both directions. When it does, it will be sending in pulses in all directions.  So, all the laser beams will be targeting the top portion of the building. Then slowly you come back and target up to the bottom of the building. Then we move from left to right covering the entire portion. Maybe we can start like this. It is kind of like doing like a scanning and stitching images.  So, essentially this radar system will store information about like the distance and in which direction and which angle the laser beam was transmitted. Like if we know the angle of elevation or angle of depression. Like angle of elevation means from horizontal by which angle the instrument was looking up, that is angle of elevation. Or from horizontal at which angle the instrument was looking down, that is angle of depression. If we know this angle and also if we know the azimuth angle, maybe with respect to like one particular direction. Let us say this is my north, with respect to my north in which direction my instrument is pointing at. Say here maybe like 30 degrees from north or here maybe like 320 degrees from north like that. If you know like these angles like to in both horizontal and vertical directions. And if you know the distance from the point of instrument to the target, then relative to the instrument station we will be able to locate this point. Say I have the coordinate here or I know this particular position. From this particular position using the angle in both horizontal and vertical axis like this is say here there is some target. This is like and then with respect to say this is my north or let us say sorry, let us say this is my north. So, with respect to this north what is like this angle. So, this is in horizontal plane. Say this is let us say this is beta. So, alpha is like the elevation angle, beta is a depression angle. I know this range, it can be calculated by laser pulse. So, I know two angles horizontal angle and vertical angle, I know the range. So, with respect to my position the instrument station, I will be able to locate the target in front of me. So, if I have like 100 measurements of the building like if I have taken range for 100 different points on the building, I will be able to locate all the 100 points with respect to my station. Imagine if I know the 3 dimensional coordinate of my station with respect to some reference datum. Say in surveying students who learn surveying will know we will always have some set of like reference system like an origin from which we will measure our horizontal coordinates and vertical coordinates. Like similarly earth has it is like there are like lot of datum available. Let us take for example, we are using this WGS 1984 reference system. Like you have some x y origin and some z origin above, z origin means above which you measure all the elevation, x y means like from which you measure all the horizontal coordinates. If we know that and if we know the coordinate of the instrument station using in that particular reference system, then with all the measurements we made, we will be in a position to calculate the 3 dimensional coordinates of all the points that we measured. So, that is why I said LIDAR cannot work independently if your aim is to get like 3 dimensional coordinates of all the points with respect to some reference system. First of all, you need to know the coordinate of your instrument station with respect to the reference system you are working on. Then only from that position you can calculate the relative position of all other features. So, this is like the basic working principle of a terrestrial LIDAR system. Coming to aircraft, exactly same principle. Aircraft will be moving like this. We will have like a LIDAR system attached with it, looking down vertically downwards. So, let us say the LIDAR system is just fixed like this, looking at the nadir. So, as the aircraft flies, it will measure the range between the instrument and the target along the line of its flight path. Say flight is aircraft is flying like this, this is like the terrain. When it flies, if it sends in laser pulses, like aircraft is moving continuously. So, each of this position or the range for each of this point will be measured by this laser system. So, if you know the coordinate that is the x, y, z coordinate of the instrument station from which you measure the range, we will be able to position or we will be able to estimate the x, y and z coordinate of each of this ground points. So, again we need to know the coordinates of the instrument station from which the laser beam is transmitted. So, this will produce what we just saw, it will produce like a profile or like a x, y coordinate information along the line of flight. Traditionally, this will give like elevation. The LIDAR will only give like, if you look at in terms of like vertical direction, it will measure elevation or if you talk in terms of like horizontal direction, you are measuring distance. Basically, it is a distance measuring device. So, using this distance you can and if you know the coordinate of your instrument station, you can calculate the coordinate of ground point.  So, what it will do? The laser beam will be transmitted, but now since scanner is present, it will be able to scan across a swath width. So, it will scan like this while it is moving. So, now in take it in analogy with the ground based scanner, aircraft is moving like this, you are continuously recording the coordinates of your aircraft station, you are also measuring the angle at which the laser beam is transmitted and received. So, we know the coordinate, we know the angle and the direction in that particular angle. So, using this geometry, we will be able to calculate the coordinates of the ground points. So, essentially this is the working mechanism of LIDAR. But how do we get the coordinate of our platforms? In ground based terrestrial laser scanners, it is simple like, simple in the sense we know like the ground measurement techniques. We already have established ground control points from that we can take it or we can do our own surveying like you can do a total station based survey or you can extend the control net and establish new control points from which you can do the surveying all these things. So, that is like a different topic engineering surveying. That is possible, but to do it from an aircraft or a spacecraft, we need a independent source of data which provides the coordinates. That is where the role of GNSS comes in like global navigational satellite system or very commonly one of the most widely used GNSS system is GPS, global pushing system. We all know GPS as a common in, GPS is just one of the GNSS system it is deployed and maintained by United States which we commonly use. But apart from GPS there are other systems available that are implemented and maintained by different countries. India has its own, China has its own, Russia has its own and so on. So, collectively all these systems are called GNSS, Global Navigation Satellite System. So, if you have a receiver, it is like a satellite based coordinate measurement system. So, it uses observations from multiple satellites and it uses like basic surveying principles using which we can establish the coordinate of our instrument station. So, our aircraft should have this GNSS receiver which will collect measurements from all the satellites surrounding it whatever the system that is there and whatever the system the receiver is capable of receiving like certain GNSS receiver may receive only like GPS, certain may receive GPS, Galileo, GLONASS, some may receive like Indian IRNSS and so on. It depends on which receiver we use. So, based on our receivers capacity, we can receive signals from several satellites in space from which the coordinate of our own ground point or our own platform can be established. So, essentially your aircraft should have like a high response high quality GPS receiver which will give the coordinates of the aircraft continuously. So, that will give you the XYZ of the aircraft location. Let us know within the aircraft we know where the laser system like say the GPS antenna may be kept here, the laser scanner may be kept here. So, the GPS coordinate system will measure the XYZ with respect to this is entirely enclosed in an aircraft box. So, the GPS will give the coordinates of this particular point, the antenna position. With respect to this antenna position, we can measure at which location this is installed within the aircraft. So, basically we know the coordinate of this LiDAR system also. So, that coordinate can be established as the aircraft flies continuously. Then we also have what is known as an IMU, Inertial Measurement Unit, which will tell us in which direction or what is the attitude of the platform. Attitude means when an aircraft is like flying like this, we normally expect the aircraft to fly perfectly straight horizontally. But sometimes due to any disturbances, it can change its attitude like it can undergo a roll like this, it can undergo pitch like this, it can undergo yeah like this, 3 different axis XYZ. If it rotates around the X axis along the direction of flight, it is called roll. If it moves like this, like the nose goes up and the nose goes down, we call it as pitch or if it rotates like this above the vertical axis, we call it yeah, it can happen anytime. So, when the attitude changes, maybe the angle in which the instrument is pointed will be changing, like as a very simple example I tell you. We are, let us say we have planned the aircraft to fly straight like this and we have like a LiDAR scanner attached that looks only at the nadir, okay. Now, when the aircraft is flying like this, suddenly a gust of wind blew or the pilot has to do some urgent maneuvering to save the aircraft, some emergency came, something happened, the pilot has to do some sort of like quick maneuvering. So, let us say there was a roll that is given to the aircraft like this. Suddenly, the aircraft like with, instead of moving like this, it had a roll like this, one instant it went like this and came back, okay. When a roll is given what will happen, we will be thinking the laser beam is pointing downwards. So, the range is measured like this, but at the instant of this roll, the laser beam is now pointing not at the nadir, but with certain angle. We have to account for that angle of roll if we want to properly establish the ground point at which the distance is measured, right. We need to know the angle of roll from the vertical, then only we will be able to calculate the range. Some range it would have measured, but not the intend at point, but some other point that is also fine. But even in order to measure that particular point properly, we did not know this roll. So, this is not the only case, attitude can change in all three axes together, like a plane may completely look like this in three dimensions. There can be like a roll, there can be like a pitch, there can be like a yaw. Everything can happen simultaneously, which will totally change the way or change the point in which we are doing the measurement. That is the important, that is the need for having an IMU, initial measurement unit which will measure the attitude of this aircraft. So, once we know the attitude of the aircraft, we will be able to establish geometrically at which point our system is looking at. So, by knowing the coordinates, our positions x, y, z and by knowing the attitude of the aircraft at the time of data acquisition and by knowing the range, we will be able to establish the distance between each point at which it is being, that is being eliminated by the laser light in the ground. This is again the basic working principle of how airborne remote sensing is done, like LIDAR remote sensing from airborne platform is done. Similar concepts apply even to spaceborne systems, like from satellites. It measures the distance and the satellite also has its own GPS receivers and IMUs. It also has like some sort of stabilization mechanisms in order to keep the beams perfectly pointed downwards and all. So, it is like a combination of different technologies, like all the technologies had to mature, like measuring your coordinates using GPS from an aircraft is not an easy task. It needs a very high quality precision grade like the GPS receiver. So, everything like matured in the recent few decades. So, the laser technology was there in the last like four, five decades, but for other technologies to develop and mature it took some time and when everything came together, we are now able to move the LIDAR system to airborne platforms. It developed quite extensively in the last like two, two and a half decades, this airborne and spaceborne remote sensing of LIDAR technology. And also the LIDAR beam will have like now let us imagine we know the basics how it works.  So, when it starts it may start like this slowly it may diverge very slowly. So, this is like the laser beam divergence gamma. So, each laser pulse after it is like divergence it will produce like a small footprint on the ground instantaneous laser footprint. So, whatever be the objects there that will reflect this particular laser beam back towards the sensor. So, and whatever the objects there if we will be measuring a kind of average elevation not like average elevation, but it is like whatever is there and how many reflections we receive the laser system can store this and from which we will be able to calculate the elevation of points. Maybe we will discuss it in detail in the next lecture. So, as a summary in this particular lecture we just got introduced to a LIDAR system which is like laser which uses laser for surveying purposes stands for light deduction and ranging. And we also seen the basic working principle of LIDAR system. With this we in this particular lecture thank you very much.


Our panelists are described in excruciating detail in the handout that you received on the way in, so I will spare you further introductions. But we have Lou Fabrizio from gay.com and Megan Smith from Planet Out and also Wes Combs from Whitticombs. And we're going to start with, I always forget my stage direction, stage, well that guy over there Lou is going to start off. Thank you very much. I love going first after I took a claritin and I can hardly see anybody here. I'm going to click on that and that's our logo. Basically I want to give you a brief overview of I guess the evolution of gay marketing 101 and how I got to be here today. After a career of about 18 years at the New York Times where I managed a variety of categories in publishing products, I was finally given the job of managing the fashion category, which was a lot of fun because I worked with Carrie Donovan, the old lady in the old Navy commercial. She was the editor of fashion at the time. And I kind of think that them giving me that job had nothing to do with the fact that I could spot a Prada suit at 50 feet and know the pattern, the date that it was made and the size of the person wearing it. So I found my niche in niche marketing and in this case it was selling high end fashion to upscale readers. And at a really interesting point in my career I was approached by Out Magazine who was looking to kind of add a fashion edge to their magazine and they hired me as publisher. And I thought about it, it was kind of intriguing. It was a product that was very moldable and it clearly had, you know, a good defined audience and had the ability to expand because of, you know, where it was in its growth mode right then. And so I looked at the upside as being incredible. In a short period of time advertisers caught on as well. Ad pages grew from about 600 to about 930 and the average page rate, which is a key indicator in a magazine, went from about $3,500 to $8,000. And we were winning blue chip advertisers by the dozen. And you know, this is something very significant to me. Of course I wanted to say, you know, it says, Lou, you're really doing a good job. But what it really said was that the game market was extremely important and that the advertisers were taking note. We had clout. We were putting our, you know, votes in our, we were voting with our pocket books and letting everybody see that, you know, we were really demonstrating that we would be loyal to advertisers who were going to openly court us. The reason that Out was so successful, you know, was a lot, had a lot of reasons but it was the first game magazine that had a format that did not include any adult content and finally gave advertisers the environment in which they could feel comfortable. They would never be embarrassed by being in Out magazine because it was kind of actually PG rated. And other magazines have since followed that model because the advertising potential was too big for them to ignore.  Here one of the last clearly definable segments of the population with income and loyalty that makes a very attractive audience that advertisers wanted more. So at the time I saw the potential for this magazine kind of peaking at about 115,000 and I was approached by gay.com and they wanted me to build a sales plan and a team and monetize their site. So I looked at the numbers and a year ago, like March 22nd, we had 1.2 million unique visitors according to DoubleClick. Now we're at 2.6 million. And I did the math and I realized hands down that it was no contest. So a little while later, I had the distinction of being vice president of sales at gay.com as well as being its oldest employee. Everyone's like 25 years old and they know all these things about pop culture that like nostalgia. Like the Pet Shop Boys, I don't get it. Anyway, monetizing it was a huge challenge as I sat in our New York City sales office, which was actually my living room in the West Village. I was playing on how to attract advertisers to this new interactive form of gay.com. And wow, I kind of reaped what I sewed. I made hundreds and hundreds of phone calls because I was so afraid that I was going to flop. And I called everybody I knew, everyone I thought I knew. I sent emails all over the place. And before I knew it, everything started coming together. And we started to build a really good advertising base. And I think the success of that was the fact that we had critical mass, which is a critical ingredient in an advertiser's online strategy. The internet, specifically gay.com, had the eyeballs attached to people with higher incomes, more discretionary income, which is really key. And more leisure time to be online and more adaptability to the internet environment. So face it, the internet could not have been created or suited for a more perfect audience. Gays and lesbians, as a minority, need community.  So now I'm going to go over these slides. Let's just do it. I was looking at his watch, probably. Gay.com, what I call market is dream URL.  This is our new site design, which we previewed on February 16, 2000. And you can see it's very user-friendly. Our top-level content pages include travel, arts and entertainment, home and family, health and fitness. And in March, we delivered 60 million page views in those content pages. People go to these content pages because they like what they see, and they come back often. We get about, our visitors come back about four times per month. Our member registration also launched in February. And the way we're tracking right now, we expect to reach well over 1 million by December 31, 2000, which is really incredible. So if you compare that to last March, when I started, I have nothing to do with traffic. We had a little over 4 million, and today we have over 9 million, which is very nice. Basically, let me just talk a little bit about DoubleClick and Media Metrics. These are companies that kind of back up our numbers. DoubleClick counts visits to the site, and Media Metrics kind of tracks what you do when you're on the site, how long you spend on the site, if you're at home, if you're at work, et cetera. They also kind of gauge how many people come to the site, but they take a small audience and they project it up. DoubleClick actually counts the people who come and visit. So if you look at that, we place really well in the top 100 when you compare us to sites like iVillage, women.com, and third age. And the last time I counted, I think there were like 3 million websites. And gay.com, a gay site, is in the top 100 in many key categories that Media Metrics measures, which I think is really astounding. So stuff like that makes the advertisers really take note. And we're also growing constantly. We have a global affiliate network. Our chat service is now in seven languages. We have 2,500 affiliate sites. Basically, it's a free way to generate traffic to gay.com. And we don't count these sites in our traffic reports. So this number that I quoted was just gay.com. And also, we now have an online advertising network. We're pulling with other gay media companies to increase our cloud and sell network buys so advertisers can reach a broader based gay market with one buy. And a year ago, March 1999, those are the accounts that we had managed at the time. And this year, it looks more like this and growing. And I had to keep it to 10 slides so I didn't do another one. And my computer's a little slow. If it's any consolation, it was even slower in the New York presentation. Any clue? OK. And that's our advertisers. And fourth quarter of 1998, we had about $100,000 worth of ad revenues. And fourth quarter of 1999, we had about one and a quarter million dollars worth of ad revenues. The thing that's really important about this, and it's not like, wow, gay.com is doing well.  With the competition heating up out there so much in an advertiser's world, they have to open up new revenue streams in order to maximize their market potential.  I mean, it's like how many markets are really totally untapped. And we're one of them. These are some accounts that have marketed with us and have been very successful American Airlines, which I won't talk about because Wes is going to talk about them. HBO, which is marketed gay-specific programming to our audience. And Neiman Marcus has an online store with us because what they've realized is they want to change the makeup of their shoppers who are all about, well, 75 years old. So they're doing a co-branded store on our site. But they're very young at heart, 75. They're very young at heart, very hip, very, very rich. And I actually bought these shoes online and they fit. And I'm really happy to say that. And anyway, so we've been really successful. And I mean, Megan's been really successful.  We have gained a lot of credibility in advertising agencies.  They call us. It doesn't even enter into their, I think, mind frame for the most part. So I will now turn the podium over to Megan Smith, CEO of Planet Out. Hello. I'm going to also talk a little bit about the gay market in general online and then specifically into Planet Out and the kind of things that we're doing. I sort of think that I was watching the movie after Stonewall, and I thought the next one should be afterstonewall.com. This slide speaks to that, which is that this is the first time in history when we can sort of reach out and reach back with millions and millions and millions of gay and lesbian people around the world. One of the things that I think is interesting, Lou was talking about, out, out and advocate in many of the gay and lesbian press still go within kind of brown bags. More than 50% of the magazines go within a brown wrapper. People who receive those probably know what I'm talking about.   Similarly, overseas it's even worse. So the internet is the first time that not only you see the dot-com explosion, it's about geography and easier to reach customers with Amazon.com and others.  And I actually think that you were saying this Lou, that the internet is almost under-hyped for our community. It fundamentally reduces isolation. And then on top of that, we can entertain, we can inform, we can act, we can connect. Big changes. The second thing I just want to say is about business, which is it's a very, very, gay and lesbian market is a very big market. A lot of people don't realize that it's actually a larger market than the Hispanic market and just shy of the African-American market in the United States alone. So $450 billion in consumer buying power. Planted that's the first company in history to receive venture funding, gay.com just closed venture funding. There's never been money available, capital, to build companies like we're able to build and to reach out. So it's a huge tremor going on. Big change. One of the other points I wanted to make is just there are probably five or six or even seven major dot-coms, well-funded dot-coms in the African-American space with Black Voices, Net Noir, Urban Box Office, others. Similarly, in the Hispanic market, Star Media, which is also a global play, K-PASA, et cetera. And really, in the gay and lesbian market, there's really two well-funded companies and a couple others. This is a study that actually was just revised upwards a little bit, but it was done by Computer Economics last summer, looking at how many gay and lesbian people are actually on the net. This is showing that right now there's about 9 million folks worldwide, 9 or 10 million, and growing. We have sort of an interesting thing in that it's a very, very, very global phenomenon, gay community online. This is a slide that just talks about who the group is. Lou was talking about disposable income. Our community is not wealthier than the average American community. The gay and lesbian community just has higher disposable income and more time, because there are less children in the market. There are not no children, because there's a huge gaivy boom, but there's less children. We actually segment, there's a couple things. The Planet Up member database is over half a million registered members now. And we have a range of, our youngest member is now 13. We had 12 and 11-year-olds in there, but the laws just changed and we had to knock them out because we would have had to talk to their parents, which we didn't want to do, and out them. All the way up to people in their 80s, men and women, people from about 22% of the member database comes from overseas. We have 74 members from Azerbaijan, about 300 from China, and others. And members from all states. From a, just to get specific, the reason why Gay.com and Planet Out and others are seeing people like American Express, eTrade, Telebank, and other financial advertisers is because the community is three times more likely, it's 300 up here than the average American, which is 100, to have a 401k, or a money market, or a mutual fund. Great, great group to reach. We have twice as likely to buy music CDs.  You see people launching music CDs. We started a newsletter called First Weekend to drive, tell people about new releases of movies with our proper and cute films area, and a lot of people want to come and advertise within there. Electronics, twice as likely to have electronics. That's why Sony's on the site. One of the most amazing demographics which Wes is gonna talk more about is travel. The community is seven times more likely than the average American to take six or more flights in a year. I forget the passport statistics. Like 68% of the community has a valid passport versus 25% of the average American. 15% of us take cruises versus 2% of the general population. Is that a euphemism? Take cruises? Oh, you mean on a boat, I'm sorry. Those chat rooms. So just really interesting. Also, I really love this statistic over here on the bottom right. Four times more likely than the average American to donate to health causes. And three times more likely than the average American to donate to environmental and education causes. I think the community should be very proud of that. It also means that doing social marketing like Subaru has done with some of their advertising is a good idea. Let's see. I'll tell you one other fun thing which is that we recently segmented our target market into six groups and they're called out and loud, out and quiet, coming out, closeted, friends and family and hip urban straight. 5% of the Planet Out member database registers are straight. These are people who want to know about independent film in our Puppercube Films area. There are people who want to know where the cool restaurants are so they're coming to our travel area. Planet Out's strategy, we are very much a dot-com but we're also an integrated media company. I wanted to show you this slide because I think that it's important if you're advertising into the market to have a multi-prong reach strategy. I think that the internet is where you can reach millions of people. You can also reach millions of people at events, pride events, there's about 12 or 15 million people who go to get pride events around between about 40 cities in the US and Canada. You only get them for a day so the internet's the place to go get them for 365 days a year. But we're very much focused on being both online and also we have member programs, I'll talk to you a little bit about that. Publishing, we just are merging with Advocat and Out and we just bought Out and About. And broadcast, I'll talk a little bit about Planet Out TV. This is the front end of our website. We have two major sites. One is the website, planetout.com. The other is our AOL site which is AOL keyword, Planet Out. Very similar, we're called, back when we all started reading out a name that calls Vertical Portals. We're content, you can see some of the content channels, community commerce. In the content space, the biggest and most popular areas are entertainment, travel and news. Also have some other areas. But and one of the things to be real aware of is this is very much about interactive media. So although the content channels are great places to be and fully 40% of our traffic is in this area, 60% of our traffic is more in the community areas. If you look at Planet Out, it looks a lot like AOL or Yahoo. About 40% of the stuff is the channels, travel, news, content. And about 60% of what people are doing is sending emails to each other, or chatting, or message boards, or polls, or interacting with each other. Most of the dot-coms look like that if you look at the traffic. On the community parts of Planet Out, there's chat, message boards, polls. Really interesting way to reach people is through newsletters. Just to put the scale and perspective again, we're emailing 340,000 people every Friday. That's more than the combined circulation of the top five game magazines. So you can really reach a lot of people in volume using the net. Here's another really interesting thing about commerce. If you're a merchant on the web, one of the largest store on the internet is AOL. Second is eBay and third is Amazon. So from a commerce perspective, it's much more interesting to be working with the community content companies like AOL, like Yahoo, like Ageta, come like a Planet Out, and threading your commerce and your products through that, buying DVDs within a film's area, or buying insurance within a financial area. There's a lot of game lesbian people on the net. I call this the Model T days, because it's so early. Between the game lesbian sites, we're not even touching, we're reaching about 20% of the game lesbian community online. We felt it was very important to partner with the portals, and also if you have a strategy to reach the game market, it's also important to be in the game lesbian areas on the portals. We deliver the news to Yahoo, we've been doing that since 96. I bet we do more page views in my Yahoo for people who subscribe to Planet Outs News than our entire website. There's only two sites on the net that are doing a billion pages a day, and they are Yahoo and AOL, and you gotta be in there with them. This is gay.netscape.com, it launched about two or three months ago. They didn't have a gay area, so we built it with them, so you can get in and advertise in these areas as well, and reach out to more people. This is AOL hometown, which is kind of their GeoCities member pages area. You can get in there. This is keyword gay, keyword lesbian. So Bob Pitman just announced earnings last week for AOL, and said half of the people coming on the net are coming on to AOL for their ISP. So getting into the gay and lesbian areas of AOL are critical. They have 77% reach across all of their brands. AOL is the internet, and it is the consumer internet. Very important to partner with them. In terms of dominance, again, Planet Out and gay.com are the ones in media, this is Media Metrics, Lou was talking about it. We're the places to reach the gay and lesbian community on the web. They also put our AOL stuff up there because we have huge reach on AOL. It's more of a community area. But then I also listed GFN.com is a financial site. Lesbian.com, a smaller women's site. You may want to look at Mediopolis.  They've been doing incredible pro bono work, building GLAAD.org. They built Glyson.org and several others, a great group out of New York City. They also just launched GayHealth.com. And so there's not a lot of traffic there, but if you're a health advertiser, you may want to look at them. And then GayWired is a little more commerce and local and entertainment and they're out of LA. And Gay and Lesbian Bank actually just raised $40 million and so we should see some interesting things from them. They just launched last fall. And then there's thousands and thousands of other sites. Just to quickly touch on, we also did a next card and we did a member program. So the dot-commerce partners could come with us not only online, but also, much like the ARP, a while ago, seniors couldn't get insurance at reasonable prices. We can't get domestic partner-based auto insurance, homeowners insurance. It's hard to get that and it's also hard and willing to go and ask your insurance supplier for that. So we're doing with the Hartford and others is offering that kind of a product through not only a member card like ARP that you can sign up for online, but you can also carry it with you. Things like national car rental, so you don't have to pay for an extra driver and you get the 10% off. So buying clubs, love to work with people on that. We also take people with us to events and we webcast. I see Mariah who runs Dynashore. We've been webcasting Dynashore for a couple of years now. We're gonna be webcasting Equality Rocks and the Millennium March this weekend. There's an ability that somebody doesn't like. Well, if you can't go, you might wanna listen on the net. There's an ability to come and partner with the.coms both in a hybrid online offline program. I know that a lot of the sites are offering that. This is Planet Out TV. It's something we launched with City TV. They show it in Toronto. We're doing 24 episodes. It's a 30 minute show and we stream it on the internet. There's no lifetime television channel for our community. There's no media. We did an interesting, you get to go to a film festival one week a year in your city if your city has a film festival. So there's a real need in broadband to develop online cinema products. We've had a small one since 97 and rich media products like this. We had a, okay. We had a, and this is about Out and About and there's dot-com versions of that. Yeah, sorry, give me a picture. Anyway, so my central point of sort of showing you this range of things is that there's a tremendous amount of things that we can all do with you and the thing that's different around the net is that it's sort of an infinite space. We can get really creative and I think Wes is gonna talk about some of the things that American Airlines did. Love to work with you. Hello, my name's Wes Combs. I'm a founding partner of Witticombs Communications and I'll tell you a little bit more about my company but before I do I wanted to sort of set the tone a little bit in why I found, well I was really glad that New York Times invited me to present to you but I wanna sort of give you a timeline and I want you to sort of think back a little bit and you don't have to think back too far in the world to imagine what I'm about to tell you. Right now we are witnessing a true revolution.   Think about, I use television often as a way of discussing or determining a lot of these key points or these key times in history. Melrose Place, probably mid to early 90s there was a kiss between Matt and another person on the show and Fox at the last minute wouldn't allow that kiss to be shown on television. Fast forward a few years, Ellen is on television. Ellen is on television for a few years before she comes out. Then there's that year of her rumored to be coming out and then she comes out. Gay and lesbian issues were talked more about in that timeframe probably than almost any other time in our current history and I use that in a lot of ways as a barometer of how popular culture or how gay people became part of the popular culture and we were discussed a lot more frequently than ever before. But Ellen's show became too gay for some people and the show was canceled. Fast forward to 1999 in the year 2000, Will and Grace is one of the top 10 shows on television. I find that a strange path to take but it also shows that how quickly gay and lesbian people are becoming part of the fabric of society and also how quickly we are taking advantage of some aspect of this revolution that is really designed and really fits us very well as people and as consumers. You've heard a lot about that from these two people and I'm not gonna get into those issues. I'm gonna talk more about what I as an individual help companies do and what my firm does and talk specifically about a case study of how one of my clients actually approached this market. But as I said, my firm, I just totally forgot I had slides up here. I got so excited about my little story. What it comes communications is the premier gay and lesbian strategic marketing and public relations firm in this country. We really help our clients develop comprehensive communications and strategic plans on how to address this market. I view that we are a bridge. We are a communicator between the marketplace and those who wanna reach the market. Whether that's a company or a gay and lesbian organization there are unique things about this marketplace. There's internal needs for an organization or a company they have to address to educate their own staffs and their own employees about why it's important to be in this marketplace. They have to make sure they're doing the right thing internally to ensure that they have the credibility to enter this marketplace. But then when they go outside those messages need to be in sync. There's a couple of examples of companies that haven't been in sync and I'll briefly touch on them to show how when they're not in sync you do not have the ability to maximize this market. You mean that in sync has to be in all the ad campaigns? This is not a no strings attached promotion. Oh. It's an inside joke. I'll have to, you had to have been here earlier. Anyway, we've worked for the past six years with American Airlines and we've helped bring American Airlines from where they were in crisis to being the number one airline of choice in the gay and lesbian market. But we also have worked with Core's Brewing Company. We've worked with Pacific Bell here in your own backyard. We also have worked with Gay.com for the past year and we also have worked with organizations like the Human Rights Campaign on a variety of education and outreach programs to help raise their membership and their visibility. But specifically what I thought I'd tell you about is I'll tell you one quick funny story about why a company like ours has a place in this world. We often hear these strange stories about corporate executives who are looking to enter this market and figure out how to address the market and there was a corporate executive who was meeting with not one of my clients so it's not one of the ones I've mentioned but one of their strategies was to sponsor gay and lesbian rodeos which many of you may know about. They're very similar to the regular rodeo circuit except they're just gay people who are involved and one of the corporate executives assumed that this was an event where gay and lesbian men rode around on the backs of other men in an arena. I'm telling you the truth. So you should be frightened out there when you think corporate America knows what they're doing. They don't. But specifically about American Airlines. Quite a segue in the American Airlines. But back in 1993 during the March on Washington which is as we're on the eve of the next March on Washington, American Airlines was involved in some very public relations snafus with some employees that did not quite understand or were not comfortable with the gay and lesbian issue and you probably remember it's called the Pillows and Blankets episode where they were asked to remove the Pillows and Blankets from the airplane because they thought it had been infected by gay people. It was a big mistake. It was a terrible thing for anybody to do and it just showed how much education even though the company was actively doing AIDS education in the company, it was still not getting through. It was another incident about a year later which again created headlines like that and the advocate, the ugly American act up was calling it something AIDS-phobic in the air and actually part of this history is due to someone in this audience, B.J. Stiles who at the time was the head of the National Leadership Coalition on AIDS. New had been working with American to help them address these issues and had said I think you should call these people who I think might be able to help you and we're very grateful to B.J. for that introduction. But over the years we worked with American and we always assess a situation to say okay is the company doing the right things? We don't work with a company if they're not doing the right things internally. Are they educating their employees? Do they have policies and procedures that are favorable to their employees? Are they truly committed to the market? Is it just lip service? So there are certain companies we wouldn't work for because it is just lip service or for us it's just not the way we want to do business and those aren't the kinds of clients we want to work with. Well, here we are in 1999, year 2000. Over the years Out and About has consistently named American the number one airline and they got the editor's choice in the past specifically for its exemplary considered approach to the gay market. The advocate has given it a thumbs up rating and said that American has established itself as a gay leader and they've done that carefully and methodically and they've done it everywhere but advertising. There's a question of one of my clients how many people have seen an American Airlines advertisement? Let's say maybe we wrote that in a gay and lesbian publication. Some people think that actually American does advertise their logo has appeared in places and the only place actually they are is in the Human Rights Campaign Quarterly which is actually the largest print publication that goes to the gay and lesbian market. But they had made this five year journey they had established themselves as a leader in the market and they wanted to know where to go next and so over the past year they have decided to understand where is the next step? Is it online? Is it doing print advertising? Do they need to do advertising if they're already sponsoring 80 organizations nationwide under the airline of choice of every gay and lesbian national organization? That was a question management asked. So they looked at online. They saw this growth of these two sites and lots of other sites that Megan had talked about and said what do we do? Is this an opportunity for us to take advantage of? And their goal was, and this is what their advertising agencies always assess their decisions, is they wanted to leverage their solid reputation that they had already earned in this market. They wanted to figure out a way to create trackable programs which sometimes print campaigns cannot do exactly. They wanted to do as much as they could to maximize the return on investment and they wanted to make the decision about where to go online the way they make decisions elsewhere. Those decisions that Americans specifically were, they wanted to be where travelers were. So even though they had tried to be on a golf website because they thought golfers travel to the greatest golf destinations, people don't decide to make a purchasing decision about golf when they're on a golf site and they found over the years that the place to be is a place where people are actually online to make a purchasing decision related to travel and so travel sections of websites or a travel website is the kind of place that Americans spends its money. So they took a chance, so they looked at all the existing options and they made a decision to invest for a year in a program to test this marketplace out and they made a decision to go with gay.com. They're a very conservative company. They do not make a lot of very fast decisions. I can attest to that after working with them for six years. They are in the Bible Belt. It's a very conservative company and the way they make decisions. But the result was they had a really positive return on investment in the beginning of this campaign which began in January. What they actually did do was they own the travel section of gay.com and what you'll see on the page when you go on gay.com is you'll see that they are sponsored by AA.com so you can click right through in that way. The banner changes every three to four weeks and the campaign can be tailored exactly to the needs of whether it's working well, it's not working well, we can change what the products are, that we're marketing to whether it's a vacations or we can talk about the Advantage program. But what's great about all of these mediums is that you can actually dynamically change your campaign immediately and you can see your results immediately to know whether or not it's working. And if you can change a banner overnight and you can tweak it by putting textual links in articles about travel, about South Beach and you can have the word air travel in there and you can actually go and order airline tickets. Those are the multiple ways that you actually have to interface with the consumer to get them as many options as you can get because banner people aren't clicking on banners as much unless we tailor them as much as we can to the consumer. What we've also are about to implement as a way of boosting the response rates is we're putting a gay jump page, gay content page in between when you click on this, it'll actually be a gay specific page that will talk about why it's important to work with American Airlines, talking about these investments they've made in the community. And again, because of the brand loyalty of this segment, this helps to allow the consumer to know I'm making this decision because I want to support this airline. I didn't ask this question before but when you often ask people, Greenfield Online did a study about what was the most supported airline, what was the airline of choice and they said it was American Airlines and that was because of Americans' commitment to the market. They feel they've earned it and they actually can track $193 million of revenue to this marketplace. So it actually has an exact, a definite return. That's my brief study about the American Airlines case study specifically and if anybody has any questions later, I'd be happy to talk about it. But a new project that actually all of you receive when you came in which was a press release that you are the first people in this nation to see this document because it actually hasn't even been released to the press which is actually tomorrow, we'll notice on here. Our work with the executives at companies consistently comes back with this one question.  How big is the market? Where do they live? And as you'll know over the years, it's been very difficult to actually understand how large the market is, where are they living because of this concern about self-identification and the issue that Megan pointed out about not wanting to identify who you were for fear of losing your jobs. Gay people do not respond very well to market surveys that ask who they are and there has not actually been very many studies. The Yankelevich study which was done back in 1994 is considered to be the most quoted statistic about the gay market that is considered to be the most accurate sample that did not come from a gay website, did not come from a readership survey, did not come from people handing out cards at the March on Washington in 93 and that was a sample size of under 300 people and that is considered still today to be the most quoted statistics about the market. So we have noticed that this is a challenge and as a company that has to consistently say I don't have the answers anymore, we decided to approach Harris Interactive which is the owners of the Harris Poll which is probably a name that most people know about in consumer research and have developed a partnership to develop specific and detailed information about the gay and lesbian market. This information is the first release of that data although this data is not the format of which we will be tracking and kind of information will be tracking. This project, this initial release is just a sampling of some of the kinds of things we're gonna be talking about but what's gonna be unique about this is they currently have 5.3 million people on their online panel which they get from Excite.  So we're gonna be testing for the first time whether or not people who come onto the net first as web people and not gay web people are different than those who come directly to gay.com or plan it out or to GFN. And we don't know yet how different that will be so that'll be a very exciting thing but we hope to have a panel size between 10 and 20,000 which will be the largest panel that exists for gay and lesbian consumers.  Here's the answers. Some of the unique things that definitely support what we're talking about today. They are heavy internet users. 25%, one in four gay people spends more than 21 hours a week online excluding email. That's a lot of time and that's exactly why these two sites are doing so well and that's why advertisers are flocking to these sites because they know these people are here. Megan also talked about the importance of being online and offline. Well, when you're online and offline it was reaffirmed by the fact that gay people 11% more read non-sports related magazines. 11% more than the average or non-gay person as we define them. So they're still reading magazines. People aren't throwing out their magazines and you know there's a lot of information that shows you have to advertise online and offline to make sure you're helping boost your traffic online. And so it's not to say that we should only go online. We always encourage our clients to be both places. And then also information hungry. 87% said they were not overloaded by all the information they get from newspapers and websites and commercials and all those different forms of information. They are independent consumers as lots that's been written about gay and lesbian people being trendsetters. On the last two things. 10% feel that rules are to be broken. That's why a lot of people often approach this market because they know it's a trendsetting market. The travel statistic again reaffirms what we know about travel. But I think the last statistic actually is the most interesting. One out of five have at least one child in the household. And I think that's gonna open up a whole new marketplace for consumer products that currently are not targeted to this market that provides a whole new set of opportunities because of the presence, increasing presence of children in the household. So this is the whole study. Unfortunately my slides were not as pretty as this because I just got this this morning. So if there's any questions I'll answer them later. Thanks. Thank you panelists. We're going to have a brief discussion up here among ourselves on some questions that are on maybe on your minds. And as I said, I hope you've been thinking about questions that you'd like to ask the panelists because in a little bit, we're going to be taking questions from all you wonderful people out there in the dark as Norma Desmond once said. I thought I would start off our directed discussion up here by talking about the content issue. Obviously there was a number of references from our panelists about the content of gay and lesbian websites. Just as content was a sort of hot button issue for the print media aimed at the gay and lesbian market, it's turned into one also for the gay and lesbian websites. There was one recent incident where a gay and lesbian website was forced to tone down its sexually explicit content and make it less accessible because a large national financial advertiser in their hire to gay and lesbian marketing company that clicked through the site and the low number of clicks away from the financial content on this site to the naughty content on this site was a low enough number that the financial advertiser turned more colors than there is in the rainbow flag and said we can advertise on your site because the content is much too explicit or the access to it is much too easy. So this site subsequently toned down their material in order to keep this advertiser's business. Of course, then you ask the question, what does that do for the users of the site, many of whom, let's be honest, are there for chat and for sexually related subject matter. So I thought I would start by asking Megan to address that a little bit. Sure, I think first off, there's an assumption that people are there for sexually related material and I think that chat is a really good example whether it's gay or straight about, half of chat is pretty cruisy in general, which is true on AOL and it's true on Planet Outs, true on Get It Calm. People are cruising around in chat for some percentage of that, but really the majority of our customers are coming to find out about travel.  So I'm gonna spend a lot of money, I wanna find a wonderful place that's not gonna be homophobic to me. People are interested in the news. Our news channel is huge, they wanna know what's happening, what's happening globally. Also film, there's tremendous amount of traffic both in some of the rich media that I was talking about, but also into the database and we list over 100 film festivals around the world. People wanna know where are the film festivals? So I guess I don't think that our customers, in personals, is a huge part of our site. They wanna meet each other, get together. So I don't think that there's people who are looking for adult content on the web, whether it's gay or straight, are definitely able to find those sites that's not the business that we're in. It's hugely competitive and it's just a different space. I think that we are not unlike AOL or Yahoo in that you can go into our search directories area and search under sex and find sex sites. Most of the companies are doing that and we actually had an interesting experience with Visa because we have a planted out branded Visa card. They also had some questions about that you could search and click through to these adult sites. And so what we did was we just went on Yahoo and clicked through two or three clicks, went onto AOL, two or three clicks and we could get onto adult sites, just printed those out, brought this very thick folder to them. And what was great is we didn't have to actually open the folder, you could just sort of say this is what's happening. And we got the branded Visa card. So part of it is actually about education. Wes, what do you find when advertisers and marketers come to you?  Well, I think that, I know I agree exactly with Megan said because it is an education issue. You are one click away from anything on the internet whether it's sexual content or it's information about how to cook roast beef at different times of the year. The issue about sexual content on any of the sites is that the site, AOL to me, is no different than gay.com or planted out. What you can do on AOL is the same thing you can do on gay.com or planted out.  So when that discussion changes to chat with gay people, it brings up everybody's most uncomfortable fears they have about talking about this subject. We just basically call it as it is and we say, if you are comfortable advertising on AOL then there is no difference in advertising on gay.com or planted out or GFN because these sites are providing the same sorts of information just towards this community. And what kind of response do you get to that? Well, you get a response sometimes from people who obviously don't want to show their homophobic nature and say, well, they try to come up with a different reason about why it's different and you have to continually try to reeducate them and provide them the information like Megan said that shows them that if you're truly making a business decision and you make decisions this way and this market then this is the same way you have to approach it. But you don't always win. But I think being, we don't hide from it but there's no need to bring it up because in my sense it's not an issue that really is addressing what they're there for. If they're there to try to reach their customers and it meets the standards that they have established for why they're on a site then there's no reason to address it. If they want to address it as a concern we responsibly address it quickly because it's a non-issue. I think it's a non-issue but it takes education and it takes information to make sure they are taking their emotions out of the decision and they truly look at what the issue is. Lou, what are your thoughts on this? Well, I think it's just a question that people would ask just as they would ask any question about the demographics, the reach, how many visitors we have, et cetera. What I like to do kind of to handle it rather than just tell them what's the same as Yahoo or Planet Out or whatever is I'd like to point out the advertisers that we have on our site who are what I would consider to be pretty conservative. I mean, Neiman Marcus is a very conservative company. American Airlines is definitely not going to advertise on a site that has too close a relationship to links to adult content that they have already researched these things and that the company they keep is I think keeping them in good protection from the adult content word. So I don't think I've ever heard anybody say I'm not going to advertise on gay.com because you have too many close links to adult content which we don't have. I mean, you can get there just like you can't from any other site but it's definitely not an issue. One of the other things that comes up obviously related to the sexual content issue is the whole privacy issue. Obviously the big reason that so many gay and lesbians go online and have become much more devoted to the online media as opposed to the traditional print media is the idea that it enables you to be, I guess the expression some people use as openly closeted in that you can be anyone you want when you're in the internet and as Megan said, there's no intermediary between you and the content and the sites that you want. In the recent months obviously the issue of privacy has become enormously problematic on the internet for all advertisers and all content providers. I guess if those of you are familiar with the double click situation and what that wrought when they tried to marry the online behavior with their offline data on purchases. This turned out to be a real issue with our New York panel and I was interested on what the panel is here on the left coast have to say about privacy and how much of a consideration that is for obviously both advertisers and for the consumers. Lou? Well I'm on the left coast right now but I'm really actually a New Yorker so. As far as privacy goes, I mean like how many people out in the audience have a credit card? I mean when you think about that, the credit card companies have so much more information on you and use it so much more freely with their partners. American Express can probably give you a better psychological profile of yourself than your therapist and believe me they do. I get more junk in the mail, I mean some of it's good but my mailbox is filled with these things for American Express, special offers this, special offers that because they kind of know my patterns. We will never use any information gathered to pry anybody about our members to anybody. We have very strict privacy issues.  I mean we don't wrap our site in brown paper or in opaque container but we respect the privacy of our members very, very strongly. I mean we're never going to be able to let anybody have access to that information. I was gonna say that one of the things that's really important is to have a very clearly stated privacy policy available for customers and sort of pull them to go and read that and become knowledgeable. It's also important for us to help educate our customers about just where they go on the net in general and how people can sort of see their tracks of where they've been while they're at work and just work on education. Another thing that we do is we work with the group trustee that audits your behavior of privacy policy so we have our policy, we tell trustee what it is and they then come and pretend to be different users and don't tell us when they're doing that and make sure that we're holding up to that. We think that's critical. So you have the trustee seal of approval then? And gay.com does also? I also think there's another part of this which is to pay attention to what's happening in national policy. The US is really setting the laws for the internet and so we together with New York Times and ACLU and others were the plaintiffs for the Child Online Protection Act. It's a great thing to protect children online, it's not a great thing to require again lesbian youth to enter credit card to come to a site like Planted Out. So the implementation of that law was very flawed and we in times and ACLU and others felt that was wrong so Tom Riley, our founder was one of the lead witnesses for that. So we try to stay involved in that part of the world and what's happening in DC. I think it's really important for the sites and for just everybody in the community to take notice of what's happening because we want to make sure that the laws don't ever stop people from being able to come to sites like our sites. West, does privacy come up when you talk to advertisers? I mean from their point of view is they want as much data as possible about the computer users just as they want from readers of their print ads or viewers of their TV commercials. Do you have to sort of like rein them in and tell them about the sensitivities of the gay and lesbian computer user or are they familiar with that? Well I think part of the education is helping them understand why gay and lesbian consumers are perhaps reticent to self-identify either online or offline. However I think with the increased use of permission marketing campaigns online and those opportunities for people when they register for a site or to receive the weekly email from one of these sites they are giving up some of that privacy to a certain extent because they are consumers and they do want to be reached by these companies with additional information and benefits and offers and coupons. Well that's what they call the opt-in though. That's what they're saying. Would you like to get email from us to bother you for the rest of your life about the chotchkeys we sell? But we encourage- Yes please, send me that email. And we encourage our clients to actually develop as many of those kinds of programs so that they are very clear with the consumer as to why they would be calling them or contacting them up front and they're not perceived to be what some consumers might think is violating their privacy. And so that allows the consumer or the company to then play fair with the consumer. I still think as Lou said there are lots of analysis being done about us as consumers every day that we take for granted. And I think to a certain extent that gay and lesbian people have to be educated as well that doing this is not a bad thing and it's not necessarily violating any more privacy than they already have given up because they are consumers in general. And our job is to ensure that we educate people about why we do these things and to talk to environment, talking situations like this where we can help the consumer understand that they already have given up a lot of that privacy. Okay. And can I just add something? Basically when you look at the sales that go on on our site, anybody who goes to a, you know, a commerce site from our site, they can track me, they know they came from gay.com and we have certain things that we can have special offers on that you can buy as a gay.com member. So the amount of sales that we're seeing obviously shows that people are not being hindered by that. So there's a certain segment of the population that doesn't want anybody to know anything about them. And there's another certain segment of the population that doesn't really care. So I mean we wanna make sure that we protect those people who do care. Okay, we'd now like to open the floor to your questions. And as I said, I hope you've been pondering those questions during our panel. We've got a Mr. Microphone is going to, is going to spread out among you. And if you can just wait until he gets there and where shall I direct you? Can you raise your hands if you have some questions? How about we'll start right over there? My name is Vince Quackenbush and I'm a school teacher in San Francisco. I also have been interested in the debate on the Millennium March. And I've been following the March closely on both gay.com and Planet Out and also there are a couple other private or actually non-profit websites. What I'm really concerned about, I actually appreciate the fact that Planet Out and gay.com have both kept their chat boards on the March open to the criticism of the March, which in fact the chat boards on the March in those two sites are probably 60% anti-March. Now if I may interject that Planet Out is a sponsor of the March, but gay.com is not or is. You both are, they both are sponsors of the March. Well, yes. Also Planet Out just acquired gay.com also. Or what is the deal with that? No, no, no. What's up with that? They acquired everything else but gay.com anyway. And your question is? The end up, what is the deal with that?  I know there's- Okay, thank you. Thank you. Lou or Megan, would you like to take that? Well. No, after you, no, after you. You know, I think, thanks for bringing up that the boards are sort of the controversy discussion place because one of the things that I love about the internet and our site is that the point of it is to be, you know, a platform on which discussion occurs. I think it's actually phenomenal that the March can have the kind of debate that it has because we have an internet and we have places to congregate like gay.com and Planet Out. And it's our responsibility to make sure that those are wide open. The one area that we do pull areas, pull kind of cruise the boards for is, if there's really, really negative homophobic posts in the middle that are completely off topic, we don't censor them, but we move them to a homophobic board. But we think it's very- Homophobic. Homophobic.  We were on the front screen in Netscape yesterday and Judy Weeder, the editor, the advocate got her first hate mail because they're now linked through our news section. So it was interesting, but you know, we're not afraid of the discussion and we love it. That's what we're here for. Specifically on the march and why we sponsored it, just because I think people ask us that, we put a poll on the front screen and we asked people whether they wanted to go or not. It was one of the ways and it was overwhelmingly people wanted to go, so that was an indicator. And then from a second, said we're at dot com, we're not at dot org, we're a business and a great place to find our customers is in DC this coming weekend. So what we want people to know that Planet Out is here and so we're busy out there talking, I think you guys probably have a similar. Yeah, we'd like to see a diversity of opinions being aired on our site. We don't want to edit people, we want to, I actually enjoy reading some of the comments. It's been, I guess, since the beginning and I can't imagine, I don't really completely understand why it's been such a controversy. I think that the march is a good thing and it's a good way to bring gay people together to make them aware of the issues that are going on and to keep kind of apathy away from us for a while. So, we welcome the debate and I think that it's a viable event that we want to be at because it has definitely commercial value. The one thing I just want to add to that is the unique thing about both of these sites and the internet in general is how they allow and foster community to occur and because of these sites, you've had the ability for people to congregate and actually talk about these issues from places as diverse as Des Moines and perhaps Fargo that may never have had the opportunity to discuss this with people from urban centers. So I think that's a good thing. I think that policing of it or the monitoring of it is important. But look at what DrLawr.com has done as a website recently in getting- Stop DrLawr.com. Stop DrLawr. Right. Yes, that would be correct, sir. As well as, you know, and the unique thing when American Airlines was going through its problems, there was a internet petition that was started way back when and you may still see it on the internet. Well, I want you to know that that was started three and a half years ago. I'm still getting that email. It still comes around about once a month. And it's still, and it hasn't- The tell-tale way to tell that you're getting this old email is if they reference the previous chairman of American Airlines as still being in running the company. But it does come up. Other questions? How about in the pink in this row here if Mr. Michael, there we go. Okay, thank you. Hi, this may be an age thing, but my particular concern about privacy is very political. In the beginning of my career, I worked for BBD&O and I was asked to sign a statement that I was not a communist. And very, and I mean, in a way, I think it's a real advantage for marketeers to know who I am. But on the other hand, I am concerned about the ability for everybody to know who I am. And if the AIDS epidemic had happened, let's say 10 years from now, I think that there could be a real risk with all of this information so accessible. And I would love to say I believe that the government would not ask companies to divulge my information, but I don't think that's realistic. So I have a very specific question.  Planet Not Out. All right, to the part of the website that's Planet Not Out. My understanding would be, if I signed up for email, that that information would be confidential. But what happens if I click on a banner ad from one of your advertisers and I actually buy something? Would the advertiser know who I am? Is that a way that they could track who I am and in that way know that I'm gay? My whole issue is I'm very out in terms of where I work because life's too short. But I do believe that total access to my privacy may well become a political issue and it's one that I would like to control. So I have that very specific question for you and what your thoughts are on this issue in general. Yeah, depending on the state of the e-merchant and whether they can do tracking or not, some of them can track like that and some of them can't. They're looking to see sort of where they should advertise and where they should partner, what sites deliver better customers. We think it's critical. It was just that PC Forum and they were talking about privacy issues. We just think it's critical to just keep talking about this, keep raising consciousness and keep working on it. One of my favorite examples to bring up is that people keep talking about children's protection and yet 40% of the kids on the streets are gay and lesbian. So they're either kicked out of their house or they leave their house. And so youth sometimes need privacy from their parents. So I don't have an answer for this, but it's a huge issue and I think it's very important to stay very active. We've been working with actually with DoubleClick to join, we're joining their task force that they're putting together based on all the heat that just sort of hit them. They're the lightning rod for it because they're the largest advertising site but it's a general issue. Hello? Just to reiterate what Megan said, that it is something that does merit constant conversation and discussion about what we're going to do about it and how we're going to manage it. Whenever you do anything, I think that you run the risk of people knowing who you are or what you are and there's so many ways for people to track off the net. So it just I think is a matter of a comfort level and what is going to be used by that information.  We were all going to be quarantined to some island. I was hoping like Fire Island, but it was like something like people really started to like shun their behavior, but it just never happened. And so I mean, I think some of it might be a little bit uncalled for anxiety on our part, but I really do think that we're very vigilant about making sure that our privacy is protected. I mean, that's one of the major premises of our site. So I think that, you know, you have nothing to worry about as far as people not being on guard about that. Just a specific example of something we're looking into right now. I see David Staser, who's our vice president of product development. And I think it's net zero. It's the right company. We're working with a couple of these companies who allow you to have zero information so that some of our customers who want to come to plan it out, be on the site in an anonymous level. They're these anonymizers and transact and stuff could do that. The issue of course is your credit card number. So we're still working on what we can do, but very critical stuff to be addressing. Yeah, that's the kind of stuff that net zero and these guys are working on inventing. Other questions? We'll just take, we have time for a couple of more in the, all the way over there. Yes. Yes. Oh, sorry. Mr. Microphone is, no, no, no, wait, please wait. This is being recorded. Please wait for Mr. Microphone. Thank you. Megan, you mentioned that Planet Out has 87 users in Azerbaijan. So I guess my question is, how are sites like planetout.com and gay.com looking to target this international user base? Are these users excited by the idea of a super community or are they begging for sites in their languages with references to their own pop culture and stuff? Yeah, I think that the people in like Germany and France want to read in their own language so that they can understand it. But what we're doing right now is we are expanding globally because we see that it's very important because we have like think more users in the UK than any UK gay site, which is pretty incredible. So we do see the opportunity for expansion and growth around and we do wanna try and even like as we do on our site here in the United States which has something called Go Local. We try to localize something so that people can pick out what's in their local area or if they're going somewhere, like if you're in San Francisco when you're going to New York and you wanna see what's hot and going on, you access that. So we're going to be doing that in major markets as well internationally. So it is something that we're looking at. Yeah, same issues that I think get Planet Out probably definitely have more customers than many, many of the sort of local sites out around in different countries. Lots of different ways to approach that. The most important thing is we think is sort of just staging it, get there and get busy building things but make sure not to lose the US market. But there's phenomenal ways to build local content with just great, great partners from local newspapers, et cetera, that we can partner with all the film festivals. We partner, we sponsor the film festivals in Berlin and Wellington, New Zealand and Seoul, Korea. So we just came back from Sydney, Mardi Gras. We're sponsoring World Pride. So we've done EuroPride for about three years now. So we really have been all over the world. Right now we're very English based but we're working on that. Okay, a couple more questions and then we have to wrap it up. Over here in the blue shirt, if you could pass the microphone. Thank you. Gene Dermany, Federation of Gay Games. How much risk, I'm gonna take the example of American Airlines. How much risk are they really taking? If you consider it's a very focused sub market on a website. I saw you had to get down to your website, a very vanilla link to go on the travel site to get what they wanted. That's great because they're giving us money, they're giving you money and you're doing a lot of good things for the community but it's not like I'm seeing on a Yahoo site, American Airlines sponsor of Gay Games 6 or something like that. Do you see this like a stepping stone to finally get to that point? Well, I think the reason why American Airlines is there because that's where their travelers are that are specifically gay, if they are other places and gay people who have worked to understand, gay people who recognize that American is the leader in the market when they see an American Airlines advertisement, probably pay more attention to it than they do a US Air advertisement or a TWA advertisement because of their brand recognition within the market. So I think when American Airlines is other places outside of a gay website, I think gay people pay more attention to it but specifically if they wanna reach the gay traveler specifically and know that they can't track from Yahoo until we have a way of understanding who that traveler is that that click if they did a gay ad on Yahoo came from a gay traveler per se. It may have been somebody that was curious about American Airlines. The traffic at that site is not specifically targeted to that market. So they, in order to maximize the return on investment to understand where this consumer's coming from, they go where the consumer is. And there's a lot of people who believe at companies like American Airlines that they don't need to advertise in any of these sites because they're already reaching this consumer base because they're the number one airline of choice in the community. So they can just advertise their vanilla ads everywhere and the consumer's gonna respond that way.  So that statistic keeps us focused on being where the consumer is most.  You know, there's an argument to be made whether or not that's a wise investment always but it's important to be present in other places to establish credibility for the brand which I think is as important. I think that's more important for a gay.com or a planted out than it is for an American Airlines to put a gay ad in People Magazine. You know, the cost per page in People Magazine is very expensive whereas you can reach many more gay people for sure by advertising and out her advocate. We'll take one last question and then we're going to have to have our fabulous raffle. Over here in the second row with the papers and your arms. Yes. What a way to get to wrap it up. I'd like to ask Lou and Megan, how can you both claim to be number one or the leading gay and lesbian internet site? You know, we measure sites using different, different measure. See, there are enough different companies doing the measurement that everyone can be number one. Pick a number. Actually, we've been really religious about using media metrics. It's what we use. It's what Yahoo uses and AOL uses and we use it across all the board on all metrics. Media metrics undercounts the web. So, especially the youth sites because the panel is all 18 and over. So I was just talking to one of the youth site owners and they were talking about how, at least, they said, you know, we still use media metrics because at least it compares apples to apples and we can get a sense even though we know they're undercounty us. Meanwhile, at gay.com, they use. Double click. Basically, there's another company called Nielsen Net Ratings which is doing this. Nielsen and Media Metrics are the only two that are recognized by the net and there's a wonderful LA Times cover story. Yeah, it's interesting. Now, on this side. We're wrapping up. Media Metrics actually is kind of like a projection company.  So that would be just like the 300 people at Yankelovitch who represent the gay market who really don't because I wasn't asked a question. Remember folks, we've had television for over 50 years and they're still arguing about how to accurately measure the TV audience. So this debate here will probably go on for a very long time.  I just have 10 words, 10 more words. Because the library is going to be closing and we have a couple other things to do. We'll let Lou say 10 more words and then we'll wrap up the evening, Lou. Basically, double click is the standard for like serving ads for many, many websites and they give us an audited report which advertisers really like to see just exactly how many people have come to the site and are counted as unique visitors. So that's what we use and that's what we quote. Okay. Well, before we start our wonderful raffle, I wanted to just offer a few thank yous. First of all, of course, thank you to our panelists for the interesting and illuminating discussion of this topic, which obviously as you can tell could go on for many, many, many hours. We've done this now in New York and San Francisco and I think based on tonight, we might want to take our act on the road and take it to other places too. I also wanted to thank an organization called Out in Digital Media, which provided us with the email list to send emails to folks here in San Francisco to let them know about this panel tonight. The group is having their first, the group was founded in New York. They're having their first meeting here in San Francisco tomorrow from seven to nine p.m. At the Protrero Hill Brewing Company, did I pronounce that right? On Florida Street and it's a social networking schmoozing kind of a group that has been in New York for about a year now and is very successful. We'd also obviously like to thank the San Francisco Public Library for this wonderful, as they used to say, for the use of the hall and also thank American Airlines for their sponsorship this evening. And last but not least, we certainly like to thank all of you for turning out tonight for our program. Thank you again.