nobody is interested in reading 50 year old magazines

Nowadays, as soon as I get the magazine, which is getting thinner and thinner and thinner, I go to the two sections where there are nude spreads and rip them out. I throw away the rest of the magazine without looking at it.

Not long ago, I looked through the spreads, and they are the same basic poses and looks over and over.

So, I think that Playboy will go out of business and/or file for bankruptcy. Certainly, Playboy is an institution, it’s name is a world brand, but if Pontiac can become extinct, I guess so can Playboy. Playboy may likely follow Hugh Hefner to the grave. And, based on actuary tables, that is probably in the next 5-7 years. By then, most of the baby boomers who have grown up with Playboy will be dead too.

They’re not in the “pictures of naked ladies” business. They’re not in the “porn” business. They’re in the “provide news, interviews, stories, and photos that men (and women) can’t easily get elsewhere” business.

Sometimes you need to kill your former golden goose to transition the business. That may mean no tree-killing. It may mean clothing the women. Think “outside the box”, Playboy, pun intended.

Basically that leaves porn purveyors with the women who have no financial choice or are just not overly attractive. Too much of the sex industry is shot overseas and is violent and exploitive. It leaves a bad feeling to even browse around.

Playboy has that going for it. In general, it skirts the violent/exploitive/sleazy aspect of porn but I also agree that it’s not edgy anymore. The airbrushed high tech enhanced women definitely make one long for a bit of reality. And Playboy is a rich man’s magazine. You read Playboy and check out the auto/tech toys/vacation/liquor advertisements and it takes big money to live the Playboy life. Doesn’t ring true for me.

I think Playboy had a relatively good formula but there really have no way to compete with online services though they still have their brand and I could see them coming back. Art sites like digitaldesire.com have beautiful women or sites like suicidegirls.com etc. have young modern beautiful women, and in general, they don’t have the sleazy feeling of porn sites.

Another aspect of Playboy is that I think to some extent it has always been so “tame” that it didn’t offend wives to the same extent that some of the more edgy sites probably would.

For all the techcrunch prudes out there,don’t forget we are here through sex yes sex,……..so remember that your mother was not the virgin Mary.

losing money on circulation and trying to make it up on advertising is the old game. Making money on every print reader is more a more hard-nosed approach- it is not a solution, but it stops the bleeding, or at least the rate of bleeding.

Also, does anyone really read playboy for the articles.

Playboy needs to reduce print and increase online.

But they have to focus more on licensing the brand and start diversifying into other forms of entertainment using the playboy brand.

Sadly, the redesign only reinforces the last quote in this article. They moved nearly all of the articles to the back of the magazine (which actually were pretty good). In addition they revamped much of their content to have a more ‘Maxim’ feel to it (cartoon-ish and colorful).

I think it was a bad move. They are trying to capture readership (young males) at the expense of content and brand equity (moved away from a more elegant and crisp presentation that evoked the sense of a ‘gentleman’s magazine’).

You know a company is in trouble when they start to compromise brand. Playboy has always danced the line between class and sexy. If you lose the class, you only have the sexy, and the internet has plenty of that.