What happened to Towleroad?

Biased, unprofessional shitty writing and editing for one.........

For about 3 yrs I thought the name of that site was Towerload

It’s become a victim of its own success. Years and years ago when it first started, it was Andy’s personal blog. Then as it gained more traffic it became more of a blog about gay issues. It continued to get traction, and he started excepting ads. At one point he commanded pretty hefty ad rates, and he was getting them. He would have a guest blogger when he went on vacation, but now he’s got a full-time staff of writers. It’s turned into a pretty unremarkable website, I have to say, without the slightest hint of a personal touch.

R3 *accepting ads, not excepting ads

I hope Andy Towle posted this because here’s my answer: Look at all the attention you give to fucking “Davey Wavey.” How do you expect me to take any of your serious stories seriously when presented alongside this grotesque aberration, who you accept as some sort of valuable contributor to LGBT conversation? I literally unfollowed you on Twitter after seeing one too many tweets about Davey Wavey’s inane sex videos.

It promotes the trans agenda.

Andy Towle is not immune to the aging process and so naturally the gays abandoned him for younger flesh.

Here he is hanging out at the Fire Island home of the Very Respectable Gay Role Model Michael Lucas.

Oh, please. You accept the invitation you get for a holiday weekend on Fire Island.

Be as picky as you want about half-shares on weekdays and all the rest of that nonsense. But not the three big holidays. Sometimes you have to bend a little.

R9 A weekend with Michael Lucas? Blech. Not without PrEP, PEP, Raid and lots of antibiotics!

The only way I'd get with in 10 feet of Michael Lucas.

It is still MUCH better than Queerty. Not that that is saying much.

I thought the name was Towel road like in gym towel.

Davey Wavey's posts must have been a desperate attempt to get a younger viewership... but I agree with that (well said) post by r5

I stopped reading it when the site had a big overhaul a few years ago. I just didn't enjoy using the new format. It somehow made the whole site unremarkable.

DL is what happened to it. It made Towleroad irrelevant.

The gay blog era has passed. A handful of them used to be daily reading, but now most of those are gone or on fumes. Some of it is due to our successes.

It went full identity politics nonsense.

The site actually banned a lot of people and I guess traffic tumbled partially because of that. Like all former gay websites, it's now shit and trans central!

According to Similarweb, Towleroad barely got 2 million visits last December. Compared to DL, which was nearly 5 million.

Aside from the wretched Pink News, which gets between 5 to 7 million visits, DL seemingly beats all other 'gay' sites, including LGBTQnation, Advocate and the equally wretched Joe My God.

r2

Until now I was reading it as Towelrod....LOL

SimilarWeb isn't very accurate.

It lists my website with 10 to 50 employees and income of 1 to 10 million dollars

StraightUp is the site with the demented owner with a brain tumor who outed guys he didn’t like in countries where it’s illegal to be gay. He knew this too. Links to his SJW bs site should be banned here.

SimilarWeb also has DL being headquartered in Spring TX

They turned the site into Buzzfeed when they hired some precocious millennial Buzzfeed wannabe to write content and headlines for them. At some point they started adding content from a syndicated source to fatten up the site so half of their stuff isn't even their own any longer (just the ridiculous clickbait headlines. VIDEO!) It's basically been turned into a junk site now. Andy Towle still writes things occasionally but there was a very clear point when the site was redesigned and the new guy was hired that he was trying to go in a new direction and probably cut back on his responsibilities, resulting in the mess it is today.

They added common gay content things like their hunk of the week to show beefcake. Some complainer in the comments used to gripe any time a white guy was featured, so they stopped featuring -any- guys that looked white and focused exclusively on persons of color. At least the racism-whiner shut up about it.

Towleroad and Qwerty have devolved into real clickbait/ad driven shitholes.

I prefer Pink News from the UK and this site for genuine gay info

Since it's mainly an aggregator site, it's just a retread of news that people have already read elsewhere. There's no need to see the news repeated on his site. You can see all the same news items highlighted on DL for one.

I remember the comments sectiion was unmoderated and usually a viper den of vitriol.. There was self-important queen named “LittleKiwi”who would play Queen of Hearts and attack and call anyone who posted an opinion anonymously a “coward”. Yes, I’m sure “LittleKiwi” is on her birth certificate...🙄

The worst ware their music reviews. The top albums of the year were always obscure hipster bands that left most scratching their heads. Maybe by trying to be everything it ended up being a lot of nothing? Agree that the site revamp was the beginning of the end.

The comments section was brilliant before the entire site was monetized and went to shit.

There's no doubt that the people that comment over on Towleroad and Queerty also post here.

Was it the site that had "Morning Wood"?

I remember there were competing threads on both Towlerioad and Queerty of queens that hatewatched Looking and how it was boring, etc then we’re pissed when it got canceled by HBO after two seasons.

I was never an intentional reader of the blog...I’d end up there through social media links, etc., but again once I realized that Davey Wavey was constantly thrust into my life through TowleRoad, I cut that shit out.

I’ve also never intentionally gone to Queerty, but have been led there through Google searches and I suppose through here.

I DID used to go to DListed every day. I took such delight in the witty cruelty of the blogger. Is it still around? If so, I wonder when it stopped being talked about because I forgot about it until now but IMO it was always much funnier and smarter (not difficult) than dreadful Queerty.

Queerty suuuuuuucks. White Twink Central. They are always pushing Davey Wavey and that one queen who was a singer for a minute with like, one song. First he was mad because guys only cared about his hot body and not his music, yet every post is the latest half naked quasi porn tease Instagram photo. WTF? Dumb.

its now dreadful

i dont go there anymore

What happened to Auscaps? Are there any decent blogs or Tumblrs dedicated to shirtless actors and musicians?

A theory about what happened:

Andy Towle jumped onto the bandwagon to blog about his inane gay life and got an unexpected readership that got him a lot of fans/dick.

As his fan base grew, he and the LGBT world got this silly idea that the blog was more than a blog, and something of a competitor for magazines with editorial staffs. Towle thought “this shit has brought me money and dick! It is my empire!”

He hired a staff, thinking he had the heir to the Advocate/OUT, not realizing that the appeal of his blog was not a focus-grouped or trained-in-a-semester-long-class-on-SEO-and-clickbait shitty website, but a personal blog. He gave up the site’s identity to convert it into a cash cow driven by analytics showing that people click on any picture of any shirtless guy, and so the whole site ran down that rabbit hole and never looked back.

Pretty much ALL of the gay/LGBT blogs are like you described OP. You also have a lot that promote the TRANS agenda, while ignoring anything related to bisexuals, gays, and lesbians.

Ugh so tired of the whole trans/genderqueer swarm that has taken over any gay-centric blog. They are like locusts, devouring everything in sight! TRIGGERED!!!

Their ass-kissing is horrible:

Call Me By Your Name, etc., etc.

[quote] There's no doubt that the people that comment over on Towleroad and Queerty also post here.

You can tell by their racism.

Blogs? How... quaint.

Is that like the yellow brick road but with towles?

f43 Yes, Rose. Exactly.

[quote] Pretty much ALL of the gay/LGBT blogs are like you described OP. You also have a lot that promote the TRANS agenda, while ignoring anything related to bisexuals, gays, and lesbians.

Then they should be honest and call it [bold][italic]T[/bold][/italic]bgl because that's where there priorities are.

[/italic]And that's why I don't read them anymore.

I never read Queerty or Towle Road, except for occasional Morning Wood jags.

Noticed there has been no new content in days. At least JoeMyGod updates multiple times every day. Is TLRD on it's way out?

I still go to it, but it is pretty blah. The site's design is not inviting, and sometimes the news has been reported elsewhere days earlier. (I actually don't know why I still go to it, now that I think about it.)

I did quit QueerTy. The "news" there really is old, and the straight and Trump trolls made the comments sections a cesspool. For a while I'd still look at Instastuds on my phone, but finally realized I could go to Eliad Cohen, Terry Miller, and Nyle DiMarco's Instagrams directly If I wanted to see them (i.e., it's the same guys every weekend).

Qwerty is pretty awful, towelroad is at least better than that. I still check them out out of some sense of gay loyalty.