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.
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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.
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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.
Print porn is a bad business to be in these days. All the kids are on Xtube or Pornotube or some raunchy other “-tube,” with no interest in backwoods magazine skin. Don’t tell Penthouse that: They’re gearing up for an IPO. Penthouse Media Group, having been reorganized under Marc Bell, looking to scrounge up $250 million in the stock offering, mostly, it seems, to pay off exiting debt. They’ve remade Penthouse into a more Maxim-y brand, and with 25 websites under their umbrella, including AdultFriendFinder, perhaps they are understanding this Internet thing. Us? We see more value in the Penthouse license, for quality establishments like this one. But won’t it be fun to start trading shares of XXX on the NYSE?
Even though people seem not to care about production values when it comes to online porn, Penthouse Media Group wants a slice of the internet sex pie. The company just dropped $500 million on Various Inc., a social networking empire that owns sites like Adutlfriendfinder.com (NSFW, duh) and caters to the older demographic in a way Facebook never will.
Well, if people won???t pay for the sex you produce anymore, you can still make money on the sex they want to produce.
Penthouse gave their Editor-in-Chief, Mark Healy, six extra vacation days. After giving his notice earlier this week, Healy was escorted out of the Penthouse offices yesterday.
Healy will return to GQ, where he was previously a mid-level features editor and will now be director of editorial projects.
Healy???s tenure at Penthouse was part of a larger effort to class up the lad mag. Rumors has it that with Healy out, Penthouse will return to its smut roots. That business strategy should work out well since there???s such a glut of that stuff these days.
[NYP]
• Penthouse magazine attempts to disguise dirty, dirty porn as “art.”
• Bob Barker spins the wheel, commits his very last act of sexual harassment as host of The Price Is Right.
• CNN anchor Heidi Collins is thrilled at being forced to cover Paris Hilton.
• If Conrad Black is going down, he’s taking his old company with him. Sun-Times, formerly Hollinger International Inc., “has endured a 46 percent drop in its stock price since Black was ousted as chairman in January 2004.” And they say crime doesn’t pay!
• The 2007 Webby Awards are five-and-half-hours we’ll never get back. But at least they had toilet humor!
• With Rupert Murdoch (possibly) taking over Dow Jones, the solution is simple: the Financial Times should simply hire the top 100 Wall Street reporters, and beat Murdoch to the punch.
Leave it to Dylan Stableford to find some legit news on porn. (And imagine how difficult it must have been to sort through all the Asian porn news before getting to this.)
Well, we probably would have been on the hunt for Zinio’s new site Undercovermags, but we weren’t expecting the in your lap nudey mags to unfold until October.
See, now instead of having to click through the websites of Rockstar, Swank, and Penthouse, you can get your complet naked chick fix in one stop.
With Penthouse and Playboy making concerted efforts to legitimize their content beyond the centerfold to gear and gadgets, it’s not surprising that part of this push has involved digital offerings. Digital magazine publisher Zinio has quietly launched something called Undercovermags.com, a sort of one-stop shop for such titles as Penthouse, Penthouse Letters, Swank and Celebrity Sleuth, many with subscription options that include video.
Playboy, however, remains on Zino’s “legit” mag site … because, that mag (with its amazing interviews) is much more journalism than porn.
Porn Mags Quietly Go Digital
Undercover Mags [Undercovermags.com]
• Joanne Lipman may be the celebrated ex-Wall Street Journal talent now heading up Conde Nast’s business magazine group, but that doesn’t mean she’s entitled to her own desk just yet. [WWD]
• Author Julie Chrystyn thought she’d give disgraced ex-New York Timeser Jayson Blair a break by letting him work on her thriller at Phoenix Books. That was before he flipped out, insisted on reviewing her contract, protecting her and meeting in Texas — she declined and, uh, he hasn’t been heard from since. [Cindy Adam]
• Despite snowballing rumors that she’s collecting $50,000 fees for speaking engagements that’re booked through 2007, Judith Miller’s mouthpieces at the New York Times say she’s god “few, if any, on the calendar at this point.” What, the weekly calendar? [Page Six]
• The Wall Street Journal is downsizing, but not in the New York Times kind of way (at least not this week). Owner Dow Jones wants to physically shrink the paper from a width of 60 inches to 48 inches by 2007 as part of a larger redesign project with hopes of saving $18 million per year, or $1.5 million per inch. [WSJ]
• Because too few people are buying it, uh, for the articles, Playboy finds itself slashing its rate base by 4.7 percent to 3 million readers. Damn slagging newsstand sales. [SmartMoney.com]
• Meanwhile, if you haven’t yet figured how to download porn to your Razr, don’t fret: Penthouse’s mobile phone efforts are in the works. Forget about Verizon’s streaming clips of Pamela Anderson’s Stacked and look forward to Pets in Paradise. [Business 2.0]
• NYT Boldface Names scribe Campbell Robertson takes a holiday from social hob nobbing to – gasp! – do some actual reporting. Please, don’t expect any of that coming from this space anytime soon.
• With Hurricane Katrina’s exposure of government misconduct, Brian Williams promises the media is going to get back to actually reporting hard news, though they’ll have to look back a few decades to remember how to do that.
• From CNN to Details, to Esquire and to Maxim, Anderson Cooper now lands in the New York Times, but only because he cries on camera.
• Miami Herald columnist Jim DeFede, who illegally recorded politico Arthur Teele just before he killed himself in the newspaper’s lobby, will not be charged with any crime.
• Yahoo is adopting its role of media company (Wall Street must be cheering) with the hiring of Kevin Sites to report on three dozen war zones over the next year.
• We hear mildly disgraced former amNew York editor Alex Storozynski has found new work as the city editor of the New York Sun.
• Penthouse raised $48 million in stocks in bonds with hopes of launching a pay TV network to compete with Playboy’s. Whatever, more porn is always good news.
• New Disney chief Bob Iger is quietly lobbying Comcast to help close the gap on “windowing,” or the interval between a film’s theatrical release and its DVD and small screen appearances.
• Penthouse founder Bob Guccione is facing a $4 million lawsuit from the company he used to run, which is looking for unrecovered cash, art and furniture.
• If it’s not Natalee Holloway, Fox News is seeing ratings climb thanks to Hurricae Katrina. The news network nabbed an average 2.8 million viewers on Monday, it’s largest of the year.
• Fairchild’s Cookie is accompanying its baby mag November launch with a stroller shopping event on Madison Avenue next month. And by the way he’s going, Brad Pitt might show.
• With Cargo’s publisher Alan Katz jumping ship to head Vanity Fair in the business group shuffleboard, Conde Nast is bringing in American Media Inc. prez Lance Ford (of Maxim, Stuff and Blender launch fame) to run its men’s shopping title.
• Google is trying its hand at print advertising, quietly buying up ad pages in tech titles like PC Magazine and reselling the space as cut-up units to marketers already a part of its AdWords program.
• First Wal-Mart secured exclusive distribution for Time Inc.’s All You, now they’re securing exclusive rights to sell BET’s DVDs.
• Congrats to Niche Media overlord Jason Binn and wife Haley on the birth of Penny Olivia, who will likely get her own mail slot on Park Ave South.