RSS 2.0 FeedOctober 2009, North & South America
Playboy Reduces Circulation by 1 Million Copies
You know things are really dismal in an industry, when even sex doesn’t sell.
Playboy, the iconic American men’s magazine, is cutting its rate base – the minimum circulation numbers a publication guarantees to advertisers – by 42 per cent.
Playboy founder Hugh Hefner announced the cut Tuesday via his Twitter page, which features a photograph of the octogenarian flanked by three buxom blonds. The magazine will “focus on quality over quantity as we did half a century ago,” he wrote.
Playboy’s rate base will shrink to 1.5 million from 2.6 million, starting with its January/February double issue, said spokesperson Theresa Hennessey.
Like many magazines, Playboy is plagued by declines in advertising spending and an exodus of readers to the Internet. Last February, Christie Hefner, Mr. Hefner’s daughter, stepped down as CEO of Playboy Enterprises after more than 20 years on the job.
The magazine reported a 38-per-cent drop in ad revenue in the second quarter compared with the same period in 2008. The company has not yet reported its latest results, but it forecast a drop in ad pages of 47 per cent in the third quarter, in part because it published one fewer issue as part of cost-cutting measures.
That allowed Playboy to boost profits, but it still reported a net loss of $8.7-million (U.S.) in the second quarter – more than double its losses year-over-year.
“They’ve been struggling to keep the magazine afloat for some time,” said Steven Watts, a history professor at the University of Missouri and author of Mr. Playboy: Hugh Hefner and the American Dream. Circulation has been dropping since it hit its peak of seven million in the 1970s, he said.
“It was a different magazine back in the day. It wasn’t only focused on the sexual revolution … it was a terrifically important cultural phenomenon,” Prof. Watts said.
As U.S. society changed, he said, Playboy lost its cutting edge, though it spawned a host of imitators, including Maxim, which is poised to overtake Playboy as the leading U.S. men’s magazine.
According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, Playboy missed its rate base target for five issues in the first six months of 2009, while Maxim missed its rate once. Playboy’s average numbers for that period were under its targets, putting it in the company of smaller magazines such as Natural Health and Sport Fishing.
“Playboy is facing the burden of its own history,” Prof. Watts said. Gone are the days when “reading it for the articles” was more than a joke, with luminaries such as Norman Mailer, John Updike and U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Douglas among its contributors.
Nor are Playboy’s nude photographs as rare as they once were, given the glut of salacious content on the Internet.
“Playboy is the product of a certain historical time. It’s difficult to recapture that,” Prof. Watts said. “Given the trouble magazines are facing in general, it’s a tall order.”
Magazines that don’t live up to their guarantees often have to give advertisers partial refunds, said ad buyer Kathleen Brogan, a director in the print division at media buying company Carat, in New York. “If we saw, continually, that magazines weren’t hitting their rate base, we probably wouldn’t buy with them,” she said.
“We’ve seen more men’s magazines folding,” Ms. Brogan said. Because magazines can’t afford to scare off advertisers, many are adjusting their rate bases, she noted. “I think Playboy’s making the right decision.”