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As far as Playboy goes, I think it will cling to life as long as Hefner does, but not much longer than that.



I'm not so sure...from what I hear, he's actually one of the bigger impediments to their business model changing at all levels. Apparently his daughter has to fight him tooth and nail to get any sort of diversity with the centerfolds, and I'm not talking black, asian and latina, but instead things like 'brunette'. He's still clinging to that mythical Marilyn Monroe ideal (I believe he owns the burial plot next to hers?), which is no bad thing in and of itself, but it is when you can't see past it and grasp the bigger picture.

Personally, I used to read (yes, read!) Playboy every month...I'd much rather buy it than Maxim or FHM for example, but it seemed to me that silicone was becoming the rule rather than the exception, and I haven't bought an issue in just under a decade. Also, the mag became a bit self-absorbed too...the Playmate sleeping with Hef kept winning Playmate of the Year (in spite of more popular and marketable choices in the ranks), and pictorials were devoted to whichever assembly-line Barbie had joined Hef's harem, at vastly inflated rates. Said money could have certainly been better invested elsewhere in celebrity pictorials featuring celebrities that the readership actually gave a flying fuck about.

Playboy has a strong brand (look at all the Playboy merch you can get), but in the end, the brand might outlive the magazine if they're not careful. Right now, they have both 'The Penthouse Problem' (wherein Penthouse hit the wall because it was the neither-fish-nor-fowl middle rung between the ultra-soft Playboy and the more graphically explicit Hustler), only this time their competitors are the ultra-soft 'lad's mags' and the ultra-hard 'internet porn'.

What makes their situation doubly problematic is that there are already numerous websites out there that offer the same sort of content as Playboy, but offer a lot more of it and more often than not do it better (Suze, DDG, Met-Art, Hegre, Femjoy, etc), and the fact that you can download either the pictorials that someone has scanned or an entire pdf of the mag off of P2P almost simultaneously as the print version hits the shelves.

Playboy got a warning sign that they didn't heed when Perfect 10 became a success. They just stayed in their hole and kept digging.

I tend to think when Christie Hefner takes the reins for real, she'll quickly hand them over to someone who knows what they're doing, business-wise, with a mandate to whip the company into shape. The real question is whether she will ever get the opportunity.