Pleasure, Playboy and the Business of Nudity

If nudity sells, why is Playboy shying away from it?

If everyone is consuming nudity voraciously, why has Playboy decided not to use any nudes in their cover any more?

I opened the Playboy website for the first time while writing this, and found my first clue. The browsing filter in my office had blocked the website, classifying it under ‘pornography’.

There you have it. Nudity that is too egregious for work. 

According to the Alliance for Audited Media, quoted by New York Times in their report on the magazine’s pivoting from NSFW (Not Safe for Work) to SFW (Safe for Work), Playboy’s circulation dropped from 5.6 million in 1975 to about 800,000 in the recent times.

Coming from Mr Hugh Hefner, publisher of Playboy, straight from his mansion – fully nude shots are now “passé”.

The redesigned Playboy, whose print version will be launched in March, will still feature a Playmate of the Month and erotic images of women, but will be rated PG-13, a rating that means its content is inappropriate for children under 13.

Perception of Nudity Trumps Everything Else?

Playboy wasn’t just the voyeur’s paradise – investigative journalism, brilliant profiles and interviews with personalities like Vladimir Nabokov, Martin Luther King Jr, and stories published by the likes of Margaret Atwood, Haruki Murakami occupied prime space in the magazine.

Patrons’ seriousness for the magazine can be gauged by the fact that a judge once ruled that denying blind people a Braille version of it violated their First Amendment rights.

Is Nudity a Bad Bargain?

It’s not that audiences have stopped buying nudity. But has the existential question of whether nudity, the magazine’s USP, could be a bad bargain for Playboy, propelled this pivot?

Since last year, Playboy’s website has steered clear of publishing nude content, in compliance with content restrictions on Facebook and other social media platforms.

According to the company, the strategy worked – web traffic jumped from four to 16 million unique readers per month, and the average age of readers went down from 47 to 30 years.

But incidentally, the American edition of the magazine loses about $3 million a year.

The company now makes most of its money from licensing its bunny brand logo for fragrances, clothing, liquor and jewellery franchises. Playboy fragrances and intimate apparel can be seen in local Indian Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities as well – a fact that loudly testifies the brand’s strength. But as the Times opines, nudity in the magazine risks complaints from shoppers, and may result in diminished distribution.

So, Playboy’s decision to move to ‘cleaner content’ doesn’t necessarily mean desperation. It could well be a tool to discover additional growth – growth it might have otherwise overlooked.