Why The Heck is Trip Out Travel Pushing Pregnancy Test Spam on Gay Travelers?

Posted by Kevin Farrell on Oct 4, 2011 in Business | 7 comments

Not to discount the B in LGBT, but it’s a fairly safe bet that same-sex couples are not in the market for drugstore pregnancy tests. Gay men have a zero percent chance of pregnancy during sex. Ever. ZERO.

And women sleeping with women have similarly pregnancy-free sex lives. When lesbian couples do make the decision to have children, there are usually doctors and nurses involved – not anxiety and little sticks to pee on.

So why on earth is Trip Out Travel spamming the hell out of its readers with a complete and total page takeover pop-up hawking EPT pregnancy tests? If ever there were a complete and total online advertising FAIL, it’s HERE. Go on. We’ll wait.

The EPT pop-up of MTV-owned Trip Out Travel is the exact reason that corporations have no place in niche communities. The interests of MTV parent company Viacom do not mesh whatsoever with those of the community they are attempting to serve – in this case, the LGBT community.

It’s fantastic that an advertising account manager scored a deal to serve EPT millions of impressions across Viacom’s expansive net. Really, kudos. But neither client – the advertiser, EPT; nor the community, gay travelers – are being served by this nonsense. Worse, as a potential client I have been completely alienated by Trip Out Travel’s negligence, and if I were EPT, I would be down right fuming about being totally ripped off.

Our ears perked up last week when we read The New Civil Rights Movement’s fantastic piece about the shuttering of influential LGBT blogs. (Required reading – Go.) Queerty closed down shop earlier this year, and was relaunched shortly thereafter by new owner GayCities. Pam’s House Blend and The Bilerico Project have undergone similarly major changes recently as well. And the Logo/MTV/Viacom owned 365 Gay closed down completely last week. NCRM‘s excellent piece seemed to suggest that in the face of major players like ABC News or the brand new Huffington Post Gay Voices entering the LGBT blogosphere, the biggest players in the sandbox, now dwarfed by comparison, didn’t stand a chance.

The EPT pop-up ad on Trip Out Travel is proof that this argument is not true.

I guess what I’m trying to say here is that while there is reason to be concerned about Unicorn Booty disappearing on you, it’s only because we’re moving the company to New Orleans. We agree that it’s totally messed up that the HRC pays pennies on the dollar for Google Ads instead of advertising directly on LGBT media, and we think it’s fantastic that Towleroad is having their best year ever. But we don’t want to run nine different ads on our website because you sure as hell don’t want to see nine different ads on our site. Which is part of the reason we launched our crowdfunding campaign to help build the new UB HQ above our eventual French Quarter bar, Booty’s.

I am blessed beyond belief to have a partner that pays the bills while I reinvest 100% of UB’s profits back into the company and LGBT non-profit organizations. To this day, we have never payed ourselves a single paycheck. So we’re counting on you, You, YOU – our 67,000 Facebook fans, our 8,000 Twitter followers, the half a million people on our website each month, the 295,000 of you who watched my awful Snoop Dogg impression on YouTube, and the 300,000 people who see Unicorn Booty news updates on Facebook each day – we’re counting on you to help us fund this project. We literally can’t do it without you.

So puh-leeze help your favorite gay blog – the most followed gay blog in the world – out and make a donation to our campaign. Otherwise, your gay news will be arriving behind pop-up ads for pregnancy tests.