As of January 2011, apparently GayCalgary & Edmonton Magazine is now the only freely available LGBT publication operated out of Alberta.

By freely available, we mean there is no cost associated with picking up a print copy at any and all locations where print copies are available (approx. 300 in Alberta), nor is there any cost associated with viewing or downloading the electronic version from our website.

Of course, you already know that we have always kept GayCalgary & Edmonton Magazine free for our readers – we feel that it is the best business model for a regional community publication like ourselves. By keeping it free we also reach a much wider local audience, which I’m certain, our advertisers who spend money to get their message out to the Alberta LGBT Community, duly appreciate...perhaps even more, now that our year-end totals are in.

Even we were impressed – we had been paying attention to average downloads of our electronic PDF (Portable Document Format for Adobe Acrobat) per month, but had never extrapolated what that totalled for an entire year. But no extrapolation is needed now – we have the actual total for 2010: 1,814,793 downloads. This averages to roughly 151,233 downloads per month, which is right on par with our quoted 125,000 to 150,000 monthly average.

This statistic is compiled by WebTrends, trusted third party web reporting software that we own and have installed on our servers to monitor our website. WebTrends gets its statistics first-hand from server logs, and is thus able to produce far more accurate results than a free service like Google Analytics could ever do from the outside. Make no mistake, we still find Google Analytics to be a useful tool, but we sometimes have to be careful how much we can trust what it reports.

Of course, this statistic does not include the number of times the online flip-book application was browsed, the number of times the plain text articles were read, or the number of times an article or edition was read from other sites that may have re-posted it – any of which may save a reader from downloading the whole PDF document from our site.

To put that number further into perspective, the approximate populations of Calgary and Edmonton are 1,071,000 (2010 Municipal Census, www.Calgary.ca) and 782,000 (2009 Municipal Census, www.Edmonton.ca) respectively. So our total download quantity for 2010 is equivalent to 98% of the total populations of Calgary and Edmonton combined! Of course, that is not to say those entire populations are reading our magazine, since we expect an overlap of the same people downloading our magazine every month. Still, it says something about the enduring demand for our product, and the amount of exposure that our advertisers receive.

Furthermore, this new figure shows 43% growth from 2009, when our yearly total was 1,270,230 PDF downloads. If we maintain this growth rate for next year, we can project this number to hit 2,595,154 for 2011.

Lastly, so that we are crystal clear on how this statistic distinguishes us from others around us, I need to say the following: Don’t make the assumption that any sort of National LGBT Magazine out there is getting more online traffic or inherently has a larger readership than we do. National means more area, but not necessarily more people. And despite classifying ourselves as "local" or "regional", GayCalgary & Edmonton Magazine does still get a healthy following of people reading us across Canada, in the US, and around the world – people who specifically seek us out because our content is relevant to them, for travel purposes for instance.

So yes, it may seem odd for little ol’ GayCalgary & Edmonton Magazine to be reaching more people than something that classifies itself as a national publication. Nevertheless, we continue to be the leading LGBT publication in our province - and we are proud to prove it.

As mentioned in my column last month, our 2011 Reader Survey went online mid month December, and will run until the turn of Midnight on January 15th. This is your opportunity to lay it all on us, good or bad, about how we’ve been doing in your eyes over the past two years.

Of course, realizing that a grand prize of a Chinook Gift Card didn’t offer much motivation to our readers outside of Calgary, we instead opted to go for a grand prize of a $150 VISA Gift Card, which can be used pretty much anywhere a VISA credit card is accepted. We will also be drawing for a whole slew of other things to give away, including CDs, DVDs, books, and other miscellaneous products that are too numerous to list individually.

As has been the case in previous years, this survey is not just about us, but also about the local community in general. This is a chance for you to tell us your unabashed opinion of the local climate, and any businesses and non-profit groups in the community that you feel are contributing to it in a good or bad way.

What do we do with this information? After the last survey we published a top 10 list of the most recognized LGBT figures in the local community as a way of passing along the good feedback, and we plan to do the same again this time.

But something different this time around is that we are asking the flip side, such as: what don’t you like about our community, and what organizations do you feel are not living up to your expectations. This is not something we are asking for the sake of being mean, nor should you need to feel it is mean to give your honest opinion.

Our motivation for this is quite simple. We want to know if there is something that we can do to improve the state of things in Alberta’s LGBT Community. In some cases, that may mean simply pointing to a statistic that shows what percentage of survey respondents are dissatisfied and wanting change from a particular organization. With us as the intermediary, we are able to reasonably verify that these opinions are coming from actual, and varied individuals, without their identities being known to the organizations in question. It serves as a good check and balance to gathering feedback that you may feel uncomfortable giving to an organization directly.

Otherwise we have some checks and balances in place for ourselves, which make it difficult for us to trace any answers back to the exact identity of respondents. This helps us give fair consideration to all opinions that come in.

You may also notice that this Reader Survey is considerably shorter than it has been in previous years. That is because, for the second time in a row, we have participated in a larger third party marketing survey that concentrates on understanding the general LGBT demographic. At the end of it, we received a report containing statistics from the respondents that were directed to the survey by us, which was quite a healthy number. We are combining these results, along with the more magazine-specific results that we collect in our own survey, into our 2011 Media Kit - due to be released middle of this month.

So as you can see, here at GayCalgary & Edmonton Magazine, we care about providing our advertisers with accurate and proven numbers that give a realistic picture of the value of our product. If I do say so myself, it really is impressive work, why wouldn’t we want to show it off?

Okay, I’m not quite done giving ourselves a wank. I feel like we tend to be a little too humble about our product sometimes, and sadly, understatement doesn’t often get us very far.

As all businesses should, we continue to evolve and improve ourselves.

January is our month to review and refresh our design templates for the print edition. You likely noticed that we have made major revisions to the cover, cleaning up the design and widening the area for the featured image(s). We have made other minor alterations and improvements throughout the magazine, but most noticeably to the Directory and Photo areas.

Those website improvements that I’ve been promising for the past several months are very close now. We already went ahead with the image viewer, helping to make our online Holiday Gift Guide a uniquely interactive experience. But otherwise, I’ve been occupied with infrastructural upgrades that need to be in place before I can start making the more outwardly visible changes. Patience. I’ll speak more about our new and improved features as they come online.

Meanwhile, keep an eye out for our online Valentines Day Gift Guide starting mid January and running up until V-day. If you have any gift ideas from gay owned or gay friendly businesses, we’d love to hear them!

People often wonder if Steve and I ever have any time for ourselves in our busy lives. I’m happy to say that we did each get an opportunity to spend time with our families, and even have a brunch at our place on Christmas day. All the cats hid as our young niece and nephews charged around our home, playing with their new toys and opening Christmas Crackers. This was the first year we’ve ever gotten the tree up in advance of Christmas eve, and even decorated the outside of our house with lights. We’ve never felt so...straight? Is that fair to say?

And amidst our flirtations with domestic life, we made it out to most of the major community events this past month. While in many of cases the turnout was on the low side, there were still fun times to be had.

The Ms. Mary Christmas Pageant in Edmonton didn’t seem to suffer – the Junction appeared to be comfortably saturated with drag queens and their partners. Jeffy Lube put on a photo booth fundraiser where you could get a picture of yourself sitting on the lap of their scantily clad "sexy santa", and their slightly more modest Mrs. Claus. The audience was treated to traditional Christmas songs, with a cute hint of sacrilege in things like "Santa’s Baby". (Personally, I’m waiting to hear the song that goes "I saw daddy fisting Santa Claus" that Steve told me about from events he covered.) A highlight of the evening was JJ Velour proposing to his husband Craig (in drag as Marsha Mallow) on stage – and yes, of course, he did. In the end, Ruby Slippa was announced as the winner, and rightly so for her powerful number and fantastically over-the-top costume.

In Calgary, the Calgary Eagle held their annual Christmas dinner for their customers, where they wowed us with sophisticated flavours in a 7 course meal. Barry, who has been struggling with health concerns since September, was present to help host and lighten the mood with some goofy antics.

T’was night of the annual Living Christmas Tree fundraiser, and all through the Calgary Eagle, not a "victim" was stirring, not even the ones presumed agreeable. Two young’uns were asked to step up, with jest, but soon they had ornaments pegged to their chest. Their arms and their legs and their nipples were bare, but sans green latex, they preserved all body hair. Around to the masses they flew like a flash, with ornaments given for 5 dollars cash. For certain these boys were not used to the pinch, so they toughened resolve as they tried not to flinch. On backs and on fronts, on faces on hands, on undies, on armpits, on abs and on glans. Soon in the bar there arose such a clatter, were the ornaments real, they surely might shatter. The rest were removed at the end of the night, when the boys, on their skin, felt the last of the bite.

Yes, from the photos you will realize that one of the boys was me. I helped convince Myron to do this, therefore I felt a sense of responsibility to help spread out the ornaments so that he didn’t have to take them all. Luckily Steve was with me at this event, so the responsibility of taking photos fell on his shoulders.

Never in my gay life did I imagine that I would be a living Christmas tree – I’ve watched others go through this in prior years and was amazed that they could endure it. So I really surprised myself with how well I was able to handle it. Maybe it was adrenaline, or perhaps I just have dull nerve endings, but by the end of the event I could still feel the pinch of the pegs, yet they didn’t bother me. Myron and I even shared a "Living Christmas Trees Gone Wild" moment (the two of us shared a kiss with all of our ornaments on), which got Steve excited on the other side of the camera.

I actually found it fun in a testing-my-mettle sort of way. I already knew that when the pegs are removed, there is a nasty sting as the blood rushes back to those pinched areas of skin. I challenged myself not to flinch as this happened, and succeeded quite proudly. I even went so far as to tense all my muscles to pop off some of the ornaments before the rest were removed manually.

What a wild experience, can’t say that I regretted it in the slightest. Sadly we didn’t raise as much for the SHARP Foundation as has been done in previous years, but I think all of us were feeling a much nastier pinch from our Holiday spending.