Industry News

For Sale: Playboy Magazine

When I seen the cover of the latest issue of Playboy Magazine I knew things weren’t going to be good for Playboy. I mean we all knew their idea to go non-nude was stupid but this is just sad. Now it comes out today that Playboy is putting up with magazine for sale.

Playboy

Playboy owners ‘to put magazine up for sale’ – Bidders reportedly sought for iconic magazine known for its mixture of sex and heavyweight reading

Having taken the radical step of abandoning nudity and then putting its legendary mansion up for sale, the owners of Playboy are now ready for the last step – selling off the magazine that was once a by-word for cerebral eroticism.

Playboy Enterprises Inc, the publication’s owners, have reportedly engaged an investment bank, Moelis & Company, to look into the sale of the entire company’s assets – a transaction that could be worth $500 million (£354 million).

The move, follows the marketing in January of the Playboy mansion, a six-acre property in Los Angeles’ exclusive Beverly Hill neighbourhood long famous for its parties thrown by Hugh Hefner, the magazine’s octogenarian founder.

Potential buyers of the property also expressed interest in purchasing the company’s other assets, according to the Wall Street Journal, which broke news of the possible magazine sale.

Interest in buying the company – in which Mr Hefner owns a roughly one-third stake – is said to have come from both American and international companies.

The potential sell-off is being mooted after the magazine’s March issue published without nude pictures for the first time in its 63-year history.

This image released by Playboy shows Kate Moss on the cover of the January/February 2014 60th anniversary issue of the gentleman's magazine. The magazine that helped usher in the sexual revolution in the 1950s and '60s by bringing nudity into America's living rooms announced this week that it will no longer run photos of completely naked women. Starting in March, 2016, Playboy's print edition will still feature women in provocative poses, but they will no longer be fully nude. (Playboy via AP)

The company announced last October that the magazine was to drop the nude portraits that had been part of its trademark since it was launched in 1953, when it featured Marilyin Monroe on the cover of its debut edition.

Company bosses attributed the change to the growth of internet pornography, saying it had rendered magazine nudity obsolete.
Playboy’s most recent monthly sales figures have been put at 800,000, down from more 5.6 million at the peak of its popularity in the mid-1970s, when images of female stars such as Farrah Fawcett adorned its pages.

The publication counter-balanced its appeal to sensuality with a more intellectual side, carrying heavy weight interviews and contributions from high-brow writers like John Updike and Kurt Vonnegut, prompting the well-worn cliche of some readers that they “read it for the articles”.

Jimmy Carter, the former US president, told the magazine in 1976 – while he was running for the White House and after he had declared himself to be an evangelical born-again Christian – that he had “committed adultery in my heart many times”.

Source: Telegraph UK

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