![gay bars in orange county ny gay bars in orange county ny](https://www.advocate.com/sites/default/files/styles/vertical_gallery_desktop_1x/public/harryx655.jpg)
And frankly, my friends and I grew older and phased out of the scene to a certain degree. Google made it easier to find and search for local events. Social media sites and apps became the new way of promoting and sharing events. The hyped-up theme parties and traveling DJ parties starting happening less and less frequently. Over time the nightlife scene began evolving.
![gay bars in orange county ny gay bars in orange county ny](https://img1.10bestmedia.com/static/img/placeholder-nightlife.jpg)
I never gave it the time and effort it would have needed to grow into a serious business. I had some success in each of those areas, but throughout the course of the last 15 years, HVN has always remained a side project for me. When I first started posting events, I did it as a hobby, but over time I thought of various ways to monetize the site, including charging for listings, placing advertisements on the site, promoting other people's events, and throwing my own events. My knowledge of SEO helped push us high in the search engine rankings and we'd often have over 100 people hitting the site on a daily basis. As soon as I'd get a new flyer, I would post it on the site. So I registered the domain and, using my experience building web sites, created an online calendar listing of upcoming events. This was before Facebook was popular and the information was harder to gather than it is now. After doing this for a couple months, I thought that other people might want the same information we had. We would then pick what we thought was going to be the best party for that night. Seeing as we had so many options, I would gather up as many club flyers as I could for the upcoming weeks and present the options to the group. At the time, there was a lot going on in the nightlife scene and theme parties were popular. We liked switching things up and not hitting the same places all the time, so we'd cycle through venues in each of these cities. Living in Orange County, we had a wide variety of options within a reasonable driving distance, including: Middletown, Newburgh, Nyack, Poughkeepsie, Monticello, White Plains, Kingston, and New Paltz. My friends and I had graduated college and regularly spent our weekends out on the town. I came up with the concept for Hudson Valley Nightlife in 2003.
![gay bars in orange county ny gay bars in orange county ny](https://s26162.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Red-State-Blues-cover-2.png)
Posted on January 6th, 2018 by Ryan Smith HVN has decided to suspend operations for now