You can’t really blame those absurd million dollar pictorial offers made to Hollywood starlets as the reason Playboy’s balance sheet is stained red. It’s not like Miley Cyrus & Co. actually take them seriously.

But Playboy’s parent, Playboy Enterprises, saw a loss of $3.1 million on revenue of $87.5 million in Q1 of this year; in Q1 of last year, Playboy earned $1.4 million on revenue of $85.4 million. The print magazine is blamed for much of the downturn, but only 20 percent of the company’s overall dollars come from advertising. [NYT]

So blame XTube, PornoTube, and all the rest of the free porn video sites that are stealing Playboy’s niche. Always the first to conquer an industry, porn is now seeing the premium digital space it carved out for itself taken over by free offerings, though CEO Christie Hefner refutes that explanation: “There isn’t anything different about the fact that people can access explicit sexual content on the Internet because they could access it in other forms before.” Adds the Times: “She noted that Penthouse and Hustler were introduced in the 1970s; that explicit videos became available in the late 1980s, fueling the sales of VCRs; and the advent of satellite television in the early ’90s gave people still another option for spicy movies ‘in the privacy of your home.’”

All true, but none of them were free.

So what’s a scantily clad girl to do?

Take a look at what competitor Penthouse is doing. That magazine is finding success in Christian dating sites.

Last December, Penthouse’s parent, Penthouse Media Group, debt-laden and bought in 2004 by a group of investors, snapped up social-networking giant Various, Inc. for $500 million, adding sites like AdultFriendFinder.com to its portfolio. And also, Bondage.com and BigChurch.com, the Christian site with the slogan, “Bringing people together in love and faith.” [Newsweek]

Says spokeswoman Martha Lindeman: “Traditional print is a heritage business for us, and an important part of the brand. But realistically it’s not a business that we see growing.”

Operating well under the media radar compared with other social-networking companies like Facebook and MySpace, Various, headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif., has a deceptively broad and profitable reach. Its subsidiaries now include a number of online dating sites—from BigChurch.com to Bondage.com—that have signed up a combined 250 million members since they were founded and 1.2 million current subscribers who pay for content. Its biggest, AdultFriendFinder.com—which bills itself as “the world’s largest adult sex and swingers site”—is one of the most highly trafficked Web sites in the world with more than 18 million members, the company says. Bell says in the coming months Penthouse Media Group will be renamed FriendFinder Networks, Inc., and he plans to take the company public by the end of the year. The Penthouse brand will be a well-known but admittedly smaller arm of the company. [...]

The company’s strategy is to use its technology platform—and its well-established network of 600,000 online affiliates that link to its sites—to support a potentially unlimited number of sites catering to daters, friend seekers and adult-content consumers around the world. Dateless in Beijing? Try ChineseFriendFinder.com. Single and interested in a threesome in Omaha? AdultFriendFinder.com has plenty of couples looking for you, many of whom have uploaded erotic pictures of themselves.

So where does Penthouse fit in? Its name recognition can help cut through the Internet clutter. “Penthouse is a worldwide trademark and we see opportunity in combining our brands,” Bell says. BigChurch.com, meet LikeMyNudePhoto.com. Opposites, it is said, attract.