When it comes to their visitors, gay sites are much like their straight counterparts. The focus is local, providing an online meeting ground for people of like interests.

But in the race to become No. 1, the big push these days is global, with most of the major sites establishing or aiming to establish bases in Europe and elsewhere around the world.

One such is Out In America, a network of city sites offering local news, events and love connections for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender folks. Out in America already has sites in Britain, Canada and Mexico and is in talks about rolling out sites in Europe and even South America. Explains Jon Mabry, its marketing director: "International is the next big thing.”

Other U.S. sites in the global chase include Gay.com, Gaydar and Manhunt. Gay.com has British, French, Italian and Latin American operations, while ManHunt.net recently rolled out across Europe. Gaydar began in London and is now worldwide.

“It’s the same players around the world. Everyone is chasing after the same rainbows,” says Stewart Who, editor at Gay.com in London. 

The push is coming even as the gay sites continue to see strong growth in their U.S. audiences, some 18 percent between February 2007 to February 2006, according to Hitwise, the web tracking firm. 

The sense is that even with that growth the domestic market is already saturated and that the real opportunities are overseas.

Domestically, visitors to gay sites are spending nearly twice as much time per visit, at more than 21 minutes on average, versus 11 minutes spent on all web sites, according to Hitwise.

“To me, that indicates, for one thing, the importance of these sites to their users," says LeeAnn Prescott, Hitwise's research director. "They are spending a lot of time pursing the listings and interacting with each other on the sites.”

Traffic to gay sites is heavily male, at 82 percent, according to Hitwise, and the largest age group is 35-44s, accounting for 29 percent of the visits to sites within the gay category. That skews slightly older than the general internet population.

Understandably, the battle is over which site can claim the widest audience in the total gay community, and in that big numbers get tossed around. 

Out In America claims 7 million unique visitors a month across its network of sites, which it says gives it one of the largest audiences of gay and lesbian eyeballs in the world. Revenue comes from subscriptions and local and national advertising.

A major competitor is Gay.com, which provides news, chat and personals sites and is part of PlanetOut Inc., a public company that owns a range of magazines and online properties and has been on a buying streak of late. The flagship, gay.com, claims some 5 million unique monthly visitors 

Gay.com was No. 3 in Hitwise rankings for the week ended March 17 and Gay.com Personals was No. 4 in the gay category (see chart, below). Out in America doesn’t show up on the Hitwise top 10 because it's an amalgamation of city sites, such as OutInColumbus.com. 

Others making the top 10: Adam4Adam.com (No. 1) and ManHunt.net (No 2), both dating sites, a rapidly growing segment in the category.

But the bigger challenge to the gay sites may not be other gay sites but that monster of social networking, MySpace. 

“We have seen it with the dating category generally and it will be the case for gay and lesbian sites too,” says Prescott.

MySpace has the advantage of being free, which looks to be a major plus. A year ago, 4 percent of visitors to the gay and lesbian category were at MySpace before they went to a gay and lesbian site, according to Hitwise. Now that figure is 9 percent.  

Meanwhile, in online ratings for the week ended March 4, the top five parent companies were Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Time Warner and News Corp. Online for the seventh straight week. The top five brands were Google, Yahoo, MSN/Windows Live, AOL Media Network and Microsoft.

Experian Group Limited was the top advertiser with 9.54 million impressions generated, followed by No. 2 NexTag at 5.62 million, both down from last week. With 25.46 million ads served, Yahoo was again the top advertising site, more than tripling No. 2 MySpace at 6.86 million.

Sessions per person per week were even to last week at 16, with domains visited per person also even at 39. Average PC time per person per week was up 2.4 percent to 17 hours and 13 minutes.