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. CONTINUED »
Hugh Hefner generously announced today that naked Miley Cyrus would be nakedly “welcomed in [his] magazine” full of naked ladies—when she’s of age, of course. [Us] This isn’t the first time that the doddering coot, or his kin, pulled such a stunt, knowing full well the offer would get a write up in the gossip columns, but that the starlets would never agree. Below, a look back at some of the million dollar deals, made by creepy old men, and Joe Francis, that never were. CONTINUED »
Heavens to Betsy, the military is about to lose their porn! If Georgia’s republican congressman Paul Broun has his way, the House will pass his legislation to ban Playboy, Hustler, and Penthouse from being delivered to U.S. bases. In fact, he says, the Military Honor and Decency Act already bans it, but last year a loophole was formed when a Department of Defense committee ruled those magazines aren’t pornographic. [Military.com, via Savage] Please just don’t ban legitimate magazines, which have a much more appropriate place with our men in uniform, like Out, The Advocate, and Inches.
If the Church of Scientology can have a YouTube channel, so can Playboy. What other cults can we get on there?
Playboy is teaming up up with Burton to make sure Jackson Hole and Aspen are blanketed with kid-friendly images this winter. [men.style.com]
In September, Playboy ran an interview with Keith Olbermann where he said something like “Fox News is worse than Al Aqaeda - worse for our society.” In our book, it’s six of one, half dozen of the other.
But Playboy readers were offended, wrote in letters saying so. And Playboy editors wanted to keep their “Dear Playboy” page looking balanced, so they did a little recruiting and found “Becky Liebowitz,” the author of Either Relevant Or True, a Keith Olbermann fan blog, to write in. CONTINUED »
NO ALARMS AND NO SURPRISES Sources at Playboy say they’re considering offering Alycia Lane some serious vacation spending money to pose for the magazine. How else could the story of an attractive semi-famous person yelling homophobic epithets at a cop end? [Queerty]
Kimberly Bell, Barry Bonds’s ex-wife, has a six-page spread in the November issue of Playboy.
Why would Playboy put Bell, who is 36, in the magazine? Well, for one she’s hot. But mainly, she spills the beans on Bonds.
Bell, along with basic logic, says Bonds was on steroids, which caused his testicles to shrivel and led to erectile dysfunction.
Even when his recticle was functioning, apparently Bonds wasn’t much of a lover. Just like his home run record, his wife’s orgasms were fake. As she said,
When you’re dealing with somebody who’s that selfish, with that kind of ego, you learn to exaggerate your reactions to make him feel better.
And we always thought of Bonds as a performance player.
Despite our claims that people will pay for the viewing of or possibility of having sex, Playboy.com is going to an advertising model. Ad Age reports
Playboy has decided to prioritize traffic and the ad revenue its growth should attract by featuring more of the content on its site’s home page that viewers can get free.
The ads will be aimed at 15 year-old boys who are excited they don’t need to steal their moms’ credit cards to see naked women.
[AdAge]
Now that the Internet is just for Facebook, Playboy is trying to maintain its relevance and impossibly high standards for women through its own site, Playboy U. How will the “exclusive, college-only, non-nude” differ from Facebook and MySpace?
For one, “high schoolers, old dudes and your Mom can’t join.”
Because it would be a total buzz kill if your mom knew your taste in porn was so vanilla.
• Mo’Nique is like Oprah twenty years ago: overweight and hellbent on world domination.
• If you ever find yourself laughing at a commercial, Slate is here to ruin it for you.
• Forget those old magazines with half of the pages stuck together. Now you can see those vintage Anna Nicole Smith crotch-shots on DVD!
• Forbes did the math and found out that investing in Matt Damon is actually more profitable than anyone could have imagined.
• Nothing says “I love you” quite like a Brangelina postage stamp.
• At least Madonna’s illegally adopted African boy got a taste of the good life, for like, 5 seconds.
According to today’s Page Six, author/nutjob Laura Albert (recently convicted on fraud charges for misrepresenting herself as a transsexual prostitute) is already eying her future career prospects.
Laura Albert - the curvy literary hoaxer who wrote best-selling books under the fictional guise of Leroy, the supposed son of a truck-stop hooker - says she’d be willing to bare it all for a spread in Playboy. “I would really dig it,” she told Page Six. Playboy had no immediate comment on whether it will make an offer to Albert, 41, who just lost a $116,500 court battle with a film company that accused her of fraud.
Meanwhile, Hugh Hefner is said to have gently informed Albert that she’s not exactly Playboy material, which he then followed up by asking her whether “JT Leroy” had ever had his tits done.
Rupert Murdoch isn’t the only one interested in taking over China. Playboy’s Hugh Hefner has his sights trained there, also, with plans to bring a Playboy Mansion to the country in 2009. Though, to be fair, it’s not like Hef is opening up in Shanghai, as he hoped for — but Hong Kong’s gambling mecca Macau, where you can pretty much sell 14-year-old brides off the back of a vegetable cart and not get a citation.
Sure, maybe we scored a mention in Playboy, but not everything can be about us — especially when we’re merely a footnote. The real meat in “L.A. Confidential 2007″ about the new gossip industry (ooh, Web 2.0!) in this month’s issue is between the article’s scribe, omnipresent byline Deborah Schoeneman, and former friend and current foe, Paula Froelich of Page Six. Or, as ShowNoMan refers to her, “Jane.”
That whole friendship-gone-awry really went down the gutter when Deb used Jared Paul Stern’s caper with Ron Burkle as means to score soundbites attributing her authority to her new book, 4% Famous. Cue Paula’s anger, a flurry of scathing emails, and the resulting pseudonym in Playboy.
Which all could have been avoided …if only Page Six had a blog. Then the column could have had a soundbite in the article. From Jane.
Exclusive:
Two weeks ago, Playboy Enterprises reported a nearly 20% decline in fourth-quarter profits. At the time, CEO (and PEI Chairman) Christie Hefner had to say:
While the year clearly has been challenging for the domestic TV and magazine businesses, growth in our licensing, online, international TV and mobile initiatives support our belief that these businesses will drive the company’s performance going forward.
Not so, says our tipster on the inside. According to our source, Playboy bigwigs will be meeting at 3pm (Pacific time) to inform their underlings that the entire department (or very close to it) is being laid off.
Says our snitch:
“The word came down today. Its basically closing down the whole network. Executive Vice President, Sol Weisel, over 25 years at Playboy, gone…Everyone is gone, Dan Smith, Tom Furr, tons of VPs..anyone on staff is being released and freelancers don’t know whats going on yet. They will be assembled at 3pm (Pacific time) today and be told details. Playboy TV is dead.”
Hear anything else? Be sure to tip us off. Meanwhile, we’ll try and gently break the news to our porn-addicted brother, Queerty.
Editorial Director
