No experience with gay.com but my ex was best friends with someone very high up on rainbownetwork.com (a uk site, 300 to 400 thousand uniques a month) and he always said that the clients never got a decent return on the initial ad, but paid the rates to raise overall awarness of the brand. That plus its tax deductable so didnt cost as much as it seemed. From he used to say, advertising on high traffic sites like that is more a long term thing than a quick "throw up a banner and make a profit".