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Playboy Is Featuring Naked Women Again -- After Dropping Nudity a Year Ago Due To the Internet (nypost.com)
mi quotes a report from New York Post: The 63-year-old legendary men's magazine is bringing back nude models in its upcoming issue -- one year after banning naked photos in an effort to boost circulation and attract more mainstream advertisers. That effort obviously has failed. One of the main reasons why Playboy dropped nudity in the first place was because the internet filled the demand. Ravi Somaiya reports in the New York Times, "For a generation of American men, reading Playboy was a cultural rite, an illicit thrill consumed by flashlight. Now every teenage boy has an internet-connected phone instead. Pornographic magazines, even those as storied as Playboy, have lost their shock value, their commercial value and their cultural relevance." The issues published under the no-nudes policy, which featured both scantily clad models and could-be naked women with strategic parts of their body covered up, will all change with the March/April issue now hitting newsstands. The issue trumpets the change with a cover headline: "Naked is normal."
Has anyone here ever actually paid for porn?
Companies wouldn't still be in business if people didn't.
When I was young, my uncle left a Playboy Magazine at our house. I saw it and my mother said "go ahead and look at it, the people in them are all the same".
No, they weren't. Even today, I have never seen a woman that is "the same".
When a kid/teenager can't get the real thing, good ol' Playboy did the job. It opened the wonder of women and all of their "parts" that I had never seen before. It was good old home entertainment. I wore out some pages on my favorite issues (no, they didn't get stuck together but they came close.... oops, pardon the pun).
When I read that Playboy eliminated the nudes, I couldn't believe it.
I'm glad they went back to their roots.
Yes. Not directly for quite a few years, but even in modern times I'll tip girls on cam sites and such. Not huge amounts (probably no more than $20 per month in total), but I try to support the content I like in some way. I also subscribe to a few Twitch streamers and am a Patreon of a handful of Youtubers.
If you don't, eventually the content goes away.
That said, while I think they'll certainly sell more issues with nudes, the whole concept of nude vs non-nude isn't Playboy's problem. The problem is that it's a magazine. While people might still be willing to pay for content, they're not willing to pay for content in that particular format anymore.
To a large degree I the shift the in the market is just making huge companies with a big staff just not profitable. Sure some things like a blockbuster movie is hard to do at home, but what Playboy is selling can be provided by any pretty girl with a camera in her bedroom. She can provide the product with a LOT less overhead than a huge company.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain