I think your prediction is probably correct, but it’s not because “magazines are failing” because they’re not all failing. I’m pretty sure the New Yorker is doing very well. But that’s because they have content quality that no one else can match, and they’ve also innovated a unique approach to the Internet. Their Internet portal is not directly competing with the magazine, but exploits their wealth of content and contributors to create a parallel medium in its own right, with free limited access to the magazine as a bonus, and unlimited access to the entire magazine archives for subscribers.
Playboy will probably fail because the top-tier literary market is a limited one with established players, if that’s what they’re going for, and they don’t have the culture to execute on that. OTOH if they’re trying to be a general lifestyle type magazine, that’s a competitive and declining area.
Et tu, Hef? The straight male Boomers of America reel from the unkindest cut. OTOH collectors just saw an uptick in the value of their hoard
Either that or he just got told how little time he has left and he’s trying to summon his origins roots - serious content and wholesome pin-ups - for a swan song.
Yep, some time back they separated Playboy .com into its components, divested the “Cyberclub” fan site, set up PlayboyPlus as a fully paywalled “premium” site, and last year they made the main Playboy. com site fully SFW … and more important than that, Safe For Mainstream Social Networks and their valuable shares and links and advertisers who don’t want to “do porn”.
According to reports traffic either tripled or quintupled and the average age demographic dropped from late 40s to early 30s. The company’s stats tell them that their real profit is in lifestyle branding, including in countries where the magazine itself is banned. They were always a lifestyle magazine, now they’ll try it minus the full nudity.
(The question becomes then whether PlayboyPlus and the SpecialEditions *will *continue to be adult-content while the flagship properties go PG13…)
In the end, for all its onetime glory as simultaneously a pioneer adult publication AND a serious-content magazine for literary fiction and current-affairs commentary, Playboy remained defined as an “adult entertainment” publisher and thus between a rock and a hard place, with many important sales channels and ad sources blocked off because it’s “adult” on the side of the mainstream-content mag, while on the skin mag side online porn and the “free”/ad-supported/often stolen content model far outpaced them.
I suppose it would have been too much of a risk to the existing distribution channels, contracts, etc. to wind down Playboy-as-is (which already is a shadow of Playboy-as-we-knew-it for those of us who saw the 60s-80s era), and then launch a clean ground-up reboot, rather than switch on the march. And better it have Hef’s signature on it so if it goes down badly it falls on nobody’s head but the Founder.
Honestly, it’s all for the best. It’s been many years since any of the pixels that made it to the page were actually generated from light that actually contacted the models. The amount of Photoshop and/or airbrushing involved (plus the odd tinting choices) meant that the pictures had surprisingly little erotic or artistic appeal.
It’s the end of an era. Playboy declares nudes are passé and will stop publishing them in the print edition of the magazine. (Apparently its website dispensed with nudes some time ago. Who knew?)
So now you really will be reading it for the articles.
Women actually look hotter when they have some clothes on. Like hot pants? It looks hotter when it is a normal hot pants. When it is a micro hot pants that you can see almost the entire buttocks, it actually looks… not so hot. I’m more into that alluring furtive skin exposure rather than completely freely give-away exposure.
If they turned it into a GQ or Men’s Health for heterosexuals, or a Maxim or FHM for adults, they could have something. By today’s standards, Playboy is already pretty tame and the photo layouts are a small part of the magazine. They could still make it as a lifestyle guide.
In the developing world, the brand symbolizes luxury and the high life. The logo is all over the place in Panama. It can continue to make money as long as people in the third world see the US life style as something to aspire to. That will continue to be true regardless of what happens to the magazine.
