Revenge is always sweet — and no one dishes it out more cuttingly than the gays. Mark Elderkin, the founder of Gay.com — the queer portal that merged with PlanetOut — was, by all appearances, abruptly pushed out of his company last year in a so-called reorganization orchestrated by new CEO Karen Magee. Since then, PlanetOut has suffered a financial torture by a thousand cuts, as a host of new gay blogs and dating sites steal its traffic. Last month, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates gave the company a helping hand with fresh financing. But now, Elderkin has designed a scheme to sharpen the assaults of PlanetOut's rivals — and increase his former company's pain.

How? Elderkin has launched a new online-advertising network which pulls most of the online gay competition together into a single advertising buy — a knife, in other words, pointed at PlanetOut's heart. The pitch for the network includes all of PlanetOut's standard marketing tricks, including citing the earning power and other attractive features of the gay demographic.

Elderkin's Gay Ad Network is, in itself, a smart move, playing on marketers' interest in targeted networks that allow them to place advertisements more thoughtfully. But that doesn't mean that his new venture is not, at the same time, a supremely pointed slash by the ad world's gay blade at Magee and his old company.