You know, the magazine baby boomers hid under their mattresses and straight men up until the past decade or so 'read for the articles'? The publication that took sex from something that happened in the bedroom to something you could buy at a news stand during a time when the idea of 'sexual liberation' had yet to be conceived.
For anyone who’s interested in the media,
Playboy is iconic. Whether you love it, hate it, or don’t have an opinion about it, the controversial magazine changed the publishing industry.
It opened the gates and unlocked the doors for the many, many 'nudie mags' that followed and, yet, kept its audience for years to come, despite the far raunchier material being just as available.
This was mainly because, while the main attraction may have been the nude female form,
Playboy also published short stories by many notable authors, both men and women, as well as articles that were actually worth the read.
Playboy survived many rival publications that took pornography one step further for so many reasons (and not just because it was less embarrassing to buy at your corner store). However, then the digital era arrived and slowly everything changed for the iconic magazine.
It could compete with the likes of
Hustler, but
Pornhub was a completely different ballgame. Which is why, in 2015, the brand known for putting nudity on the shelves announced that it would stop showing nudity in its print edition the following year. That’s definitely a business model pivot for the textbooks.
Hefner, and those really in charge of the magazine (let’s be real, he couldn’t have been spending too many hours at the office at that stage), realised that they couldn’t sell something that was so readily available online. Pornography has made its move from beneath the mattress to incognito mode.
Playboy, which spent many years as a game changer, eventually had to face the reality that so many other publications have had to accommodate – go digital or go bust. The Internet has changed the publishing industry, and there is no going back. If you want to survive in the digital era, you have to be willing to learn a few lessons. And here are just a few of them.
You can’t sell something that’s readily available for free
Nobody pays for what they can get for free. Whether it’s pornography or the details of a celebrity death, nobody is going to pay for content they can get for free with little to no effort. There’s no paying for convenience when you can simply click back to the search results in your browser and choose another option.
Your readers are no longer paying you. Or, at least, you’d have to offer something pretty special to get people to go through all the trouble of filling in their credit card details. While print publications received money from both readers and advertisers, online publications have to rely on advertisers alone.
Your readers may not be paying for your content, but you need them more than ever
You may be selling to advertisers, but you’re targeting readers. It may be the digital age, but you still need 'circulation'. In fact, you may need readers now more than you did back in the days of print. The data print publications were able to give advertisers was limited to how many copies were sold and a general profile of the people buying them.
Advertisers had no way of knowing how many people were seeing their ad, let alone paying attention to their ad. These days, you can do more than just count every click. You can tell if someone stayed on the page long enough to consume the content, or if they simply 'turned the page' by clicking the 'X' in the corner.
You can go so far as to track the journey from a reader of the publication to a consumer of the advertising. All that data is what you sell to brands to convince them to buy ad space on your site.
A one-publication-fits-all business model is not likely to last
The thing that made Playboy so great is that it was a publication that offered you both content to stimulate your brain and content to stimulate your arousal. That was its unique positioning in the market – one that earned the brand great profits over many decades.
It was because it offered quality content of a certain kind that you couldn’t get elsewhere that it lasted for as long as it did. From a time when the very thought of a naked woman inspired guilt and shame, to a time when women were not only encouraged to have orgasms but talk about them as well.
The one thing many online publications lack is this commitment to a certain offering. Because their money comes from advertisers, they want to get as many as possible and, therefore, need to get as much traffic to the site as possible. In the short term, this may mean offering as much content as possible on as many subjects, and in as many forms, as possible.
However, that’s not a sustainable model as readers won’t download your app or subscribe to your newsletter. Nobody wants to be bombarded with stuff they’re not interested in. The only clicks you’ll get when you try to accommodate everybody will be from the occasional social media share.
Playboy will go down in history as an iconic publication, even if only from a media studies perspective. However, there are things we can learn from it, and publications like it, which survived decades in print, only to have to eventually face the reality of the digital era.
A shift in the media landscape should not be viewed negatively, but rather as a challenge. Remember how Playboy found a way to sell naked women at a time when that was unimaginable? Well, now is the time for publications of the future to find their way to appeal to the current market – only with a business model that’s regularly pivoting to find its place.
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