Why Lesbian Viewers are the TV Audience Every Show Should Want

By: Karen Frost

In my last article, a “how to” guide for creating a lesbian spinoff, I presented the argument that queer female TV audiences are qualitatively different from heterosexual audiences. In fact, they are a distinct, identifiable and calculable market segment with surprisingly predictable preferences that transcend language and culture. They are highly active on social media, intensely loyal, and extremely international. And they number in the hundreds of millions. In short, they’re an ideal target audience. TV casts and crew who have been involved with highly popular lesbian storylines know this already; there is something tangibly different about how queer female viewers engage with content that is both professionally and personally rewarding. In this article, we walk through five ways queer women are different as an audience, what that means for content makers, and why every TV show should be trying to attract them.

1. Queer Female Fans Watch Love Stories, Not Shows

It is an overgeneralization—but nevertheless generally accurate—to say queer women tend to watch only the lesbian love stories on TV shows. They watch the Maitino story, for example, but not the daily episodes of “Acacias 38.” They watch Chiana, but not “Alles was zählt,” They watched Flozmin, but not “Las Estrellas.” Queer female viewers want to see themselves on screen, but more specifically they want to see themselves in love stories. They’re less interested in other characters and their storylines. Evidence of this is that with fewer exceptions than one would think, almost every lesbian romance storyline that has ever run on a TV show around the world can be found somewhere online. This is true even when it’s all but impossible to find full, extant episodes of the show itself. Queer women keep these storylines alive because they value the queer love story…but not the rest.

What this means for content makers is that the introduction of a lesbian love story will draw in viewers from around the globe…but once the storyline is finished, that same audience will immediately drop off. How bad can that drop be? After the lesbian character Lexa was killed on “The 100,” Clexa fans called for a boycott of the show, and the next episode had 140,000 fewer viewers, or just under 10% of the show’s viewership. It became the lowest rated episode in the show’s history, and the official ratings don’t capture the untold numbers of US and international fans who had been watching the storyline through YouTube and thus can’t be counted. By the next season, “The 100” averaged almost half a million viewers fewer, a full quarter of the show’s audience. To the show’s probable surprise, it turned out queer women were a huge percentage of the audience, and when the lesbian love story ended, they left. It didn’t matter that one of the queer female characters was still on the show; no love, no viewers.

Unbeknownst to straight society, there exists the equivalent of a lesbian alert network on social media. Any time a new lesbian love story appears on TV somewhere in the world, the signal goes out notifying the global lesbian community of its appearance. Queer women who like discovering new LGBT content then choose to investigate it or not based on their own interests. Lesbian love stories therefore have the ability to immediately tap into a pre-existing audience that is massive, global, and actively looking to watch more stories. Since the total number of queer women in the world statistically should be around 456 million (6%, a number greater than the total populations of the US and the UK combined), there is a huge potential for a story—regardless of originating country, language, or emission type—to attract millions of viewers.

2. Queer Female Fans Will Watch Content in Any Format

For many years, the web series in the United States was viewed as the low budget domain of aspiring film students and wanna-bes. It makes some sense. Realistically, for heterosexual audiences, there is little reason to pay much attention to web series. Why watch 6-20 minute episodes of a show when the world is inundated by regular, high budget, full-length programming? Queer women, on the other hand, are so hungry for content they will consume it in any format, including through web series. The first episode of the Polish web series “CONTROL/KONTROLA” has had an unbelievable 14.30 million YouTube views, for example. The Brazilian Ponto Ação Produções’s web series “A Melhor Amiga da Noiva” has had 3.36 million YouTube views for its first episode, while the first episode of its web series “The Stripper” has had 2.58 million views. Recognizing that view counts are not to be conflated with unique users, it’s nevertheless likely that all three web series had more individual viewers than many broadcast TV shows.

The queer female community’s ready receptiveness to web series is fantastic news for content makers. It means they don’t have to be creating high budget content for major TV networks in order to reach an audience of millions. As I’ve noted repeatedly in other articles, the fourth season of the Brazilian web series “RED” was made by fundraising a mere $10,000. And the second season of tello Films’s web series “Riley Parra” was made with $21,280 raised from backers. With a comparatively low barrier to entry, a popular web series may prove to be a way for aspiring filmmakers to break into the industry.

My “how to” guide for creating a lesbian spinoff used the web series “#Luimelia” as a case study for how the Spanish soap opera “Amar es Para Siempre” leaned into its lesbian audience to grow its viewership and then monetize it. Creating a web series or any other type of non-traditional content (like Podcast Maitino) for a popular lesbian TV couple is a cheap way for the producers to retain their queer audience and bring in additional paying viewers. What #Luimelia shows is that a paywall on a web series is not a deterrent to queer viewers, who will pay for LGBT content.

3. Queer Female Fans Will Watch Almost Anything

Most TV audiences display a limited appetite for diversity in their TV viewing habits. In the United States, for example, the average viewer eschews subtitles and almost never watches content that’s not from America or the United Kingdom. In their search for representation, however, queer female viewers will watch almost anything. It’s not uncommon, for example, for a Russian woman to watch a Brazilian telenovela, an American sci-fi/fantasy show, and a Spanish soap opera. Or an American to watch a Filipino soap opera, an Australian women-in-prison show, and a Swedish web series. Or even more commonly, for viewers to have seen all of the above and more. The only common denominator between these shows is the presence of a lesbian love story. Genre, language, and country of origin are secondary considerations to the quality of the storyline when it comes to queer female viewership habits.

The pan-national, language agnostic aspect of the queer female audience suggests content makers shouldn’t worry a lesbian storyline won’t reach viewers because of its genre or language. If it’s a quality storyline, they will come…and tell their friends in other countries about it. That said, some genres and content are likely to be more niche among viewers in general and therefore have a lower initial profile. As a result, for content to reach the maximum audience, TV shows will have to create a strategy for how to raise the storyline’s profile in the international community.

The benefit of the queer female audience is in its aggregate size. Statistically, the queer female population of Poland should only be approximately 2.28 million. That “CONTROL/KONTROLA” has had 14 million YouTube views tells us that this unassuming web series attracted the attention of the international queer female community and therefore experienced an explosion in viewership. With metrics like that, it is clearly to the benefit of any and every content producer who has added a lesbian love story to their show or web series to try and tap into this community.

4. Queer Viewers Use Queer Content to Help in Identity Formation

TV has many effects on society and individual viewers that are variously obvious or invisible, positive or negative. For individuals who are part of minority communities, representation can have a significant effect on identity formation. According to Fassinger’s model of gay and lesbian identity development, queer individuals experience identity development in two areas: individual sexual identity (internal awareness and acceptance of self) and group membership identity (role in the LGBT community). On-screen representation assists in the latter identity process by raising individuals’ awareness of the existence of other LGBT individuals and helping them explore how they fit into the LGBT community. Put plainly, heterosexual viewers don’t need TV to confirm to them they are a normal and sizeable portion of society. Queer viewers, on the other hand, particularly ones in areas where homosexuality is criminalized and kept hidden, do. Seeing queer characters on screen normalizes and validates their experiences.

The psychological benefits of representation can’t be overstated. For some queer female viewers, queer characters and storylines are beacons of hope in a dark world. Particularly in places where homosexuality is criminalized or severely repressed, queer content enables viewers to articulate to themselves their desires (individual sexual identity formation process) and imagine what could be possible even if their present circumstances seem to preclude a happy ending. Thus queer content becomes a possible model or roadmap to a happy life as a queer individual.

For content makers, this nexus of identity and viewership places a unique burden on the quality of LGBT representation. As I wrote in my article about TV’s “Lesbian Unhappy Ending” problem, content creators still operate in a world in which the legacy of the Hays Code—which once allowed the depiction of LGBT characters in the United States only if they were either villains or depressed, pathetic figures who got unhappy endings so their “perversion” would be suitably “punished”—and similar laws around the world persist. For decades, TV depicted bisexual women as sexually promiscuous and mentally unstable. Lesbian characters were sad and disposable. Creating attractive content for queer female audiences requires learning about the global history of LGBT representation and working to counteract it by creating positive examples of representation—a different paradigm from how heterosexual storylines are treated.

Every minute of every day, a queer woman somewhere around the globe is looking for a lesbian storyline that will legitimize her experiences and help her feel part of the global LGBT community. Adding a lesbian love story to a TV show offers the chance to provide just that as part of a mutually beneficial relationship: queer viewers get the content they need, and shows expand beyond their traditional audience.

5. Queer Fans Are a True Global Community

All TV fandoms create their own online communities, but these individual fandoms are largely siloed. Why would a Canadian fan of Egyptian soap operas necessarily talk to a Japanese fan of a French young adult series? There’s no point of commonality, no common language. What would they discuss and why? The queer female community, on the other hand, is not siloed. A Mexican fan of an American cartoon on Netflix can easily talk to a German fan of an Israeli comedy because the point of intersection is lesbian representation. The storylines, how they’re conducted and what they mean, become the lingua franca between the fans. They can and do talk about what they’ve seen, sharing recommendations over borders and languages.

This process of recommendation also means there is a pronounced tendency in the queer female community for viewers to have watched many of the same storylines, no matter how disparate the languages, the genre, and the air date. Because of its role in identity formation, viewership of lesbian storylines is a common experience shared across cultures. According to economist Steven Kates, queer individuals often use some type of “consumption venue” while coming out. Participation in this venue leads to connections with other queer people, which contributes to queer community building. Many queer female viewers use social media as consumption venues where they create a collective intelligence about the experience of being queer through discussion of TV representation. Put another way, lesbian love stories on TV are to the queer female community what sports are to American men.

For content creators, this means the measure of success for a lesbian storyline is different from other storylines. There’s no use comparing the lesbian storyline to a straight storyline on a show, for example. It’s apples to oranges. The barometer of success is therefore better viewed as how well the storyline does in relation to other lesbian storylines. Does the lesbian couple get more YouTube views than that of a lesbian couple on a Chilean telenovela, for example? Can you get more views than a web series from Poland?

As has already been stressed, shows should be doing everything they can to tap into the globalism of the queer female community, but if the above isn’t convincing enough, consider the following: with a production budget of $10 million, the 63 episode “La Reina del Sur” is the most expensive telenovela Telemundo has ever produced. If “CONTROL/KONTROLA” had asked viewers for $1 for every view of its first episode, it could have financed one and a half “Reinas.” And that web series’s view count isn’t unique. The most popular Flozmin video has 10 million YouTube views, as does a WayHaught video. And that doesn’t compare to the most viewed videos of Pepa and Silvia from “Los Hombres de Paco,” which have 30 and 29 million views. Poor “Reina” only had 4.2 million viewers when it aired on Telemundo. It only wishes it got the tens of millions of views LGBT content generates.

What It All Means

Recently, a Twitter user tweeted the handle of an Australian soap opera to express discontent at how it was handling its same-sex female storylines. Why, she asked, was it wasting such a large potential audience by delivering subpar material that alienated these viewers? Other social media users have asked similar questions of other shows over time, and the point is more than valid. Given the unbelievably large potential upsides, why wouldn’t shows seek to capture this unique audience? Why aren’t shows shouting from the rooftops, trying to attract the international queer female community to their LGBT storylines? We don’t know.