If you take out the nudity in Playboy, what remains?
That is one of the questions swirling round the minds of readers and entertainment industry observers after Playboy announced it won't be featuring photos of nude individuals on its pages anymore.
Apparently, the answer is the articles.
But why change things after decades of publishing nudes?
According to Playboy executives, the magazine can no longer compete with online sources of such images.
"You're now one click away from every sex act imaginable for free. And so it's just passé at this juncture," Scott Flanders, the company's chief executive, explained to The New York Times.
"Playboy's circulation has dropped from 5.6 million in 1975 to about 800,000 now," the news source said. "Though detailed figures are not kept for adult magazines, many of those that remain exist in severely diminished form, available mostly in specialist stores."
"Now every teenage boy has an Internet-connected phone," it went on. "Pornographic magazines, even those as storied as Playboy, have lost their shock value, their commercial value and their cultural relevance."
Previous efforts by Playboy to resuscitate the publication didn't work. Now, the magazine will be taking on another strategy - challenging itself to step up by making it still worth the read with solid articles. However, it will still feature "women in provocative poses," although no longer nude, and will still target readers between 18 to 30+.
"The move to robe the magazine's Playmates is similar to Playboy's digital strategy over the last few years," USA Today observed. "In 2013, the Playboy app was touted as a more work-friendly version of the magazine with 'best articles' and non-nude images."
"Likewise, a 2015 app implemented the same strategy with a mobile-first focus on the magazine's written content," the news outlet added.
In another piece, this time by Roger Yu, USA Today reiterated that people did get the magazine also for the articles.
"The magazine has long featured revealing, in-depth interviews with famous people and fiction and non-fiction from the world's finest writers," Yu opined. "The interviews often made news."
"In 1976, moralistic President Jimmy Carter's shocked the nation when he confessed in a Playboy Interview that he had 'committed adultery in my heart many times,'" Yu went on to reveal.
Further, the magazine had also featured "compelling" essays and short stories. Even founder Hugh Hefner observed that without the Playmates on its pages, the publication would be considered a "literary magazine."
So far, the relaunch of Playboy's website as a "safe for work" one worked, as it had a 258% increase in unique visitors, CNN noted. Web traffic also got a boost - it went from 4 million to 16 million unique users per month.
Time will tell if the no-nudes strategy for the print version of Playboy will turn out to be a success.
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