Sex doesn’t sell any more

CHICAGO considers Playboy, the men’s magazine and its multiple commercial offshoots, as part of its heritage. A bunny costume is on permanent display at the Chicago History Museum on the city’s North Side. And the “little black book” of Hugh Hefner, the Chicago-born founder of Playboy, filled with names, phone numbers, code names and titillating notes on scores of women, was a much-talked-about curiosity at the museum’s “Unexpected Chicago” exhibition in 2012.

That was the year Mr Hefner closed Playboy’s offices in Chicago, after almost six decades in the city, and moved his business headquarters to Beverly Hills. In the Chicago Tribune he wrote that it was bittersweet to leave the city he loved. “Chicago provided the magazine’s connection to the true American male,” wrote Mr Hefner. In return, Playboy gave the city an edge, he said: a reminder to the rest of America that the first stirrings of a sexual revolution took place at a card table at 6052 South Harper Avenue (where Playboy started), ran wild in a large, elegant house in State Street (where Mr Hefner established the first Playboy mansion) and swelled into a global presence on Michigan Avenue (where Playboy set up shop in a famous skyscraper after it had become a commercial hit).

The move to California was also part of an attempt to consolidate the creaking Playboy empire. A year earlier, in January 2011, Mr Hefner, then a sprightly 84-year-old, had reassumed power over his shrunken company by buying 30% of the shares of Playboy Enterprises (the owner of Playboy and related media and licensing activities) that he didn’t already own. At the time, Playboy Enterprises was leaking money at an ever-increasing rate. Scott Flanders was the chief executive. He had taken over from Mr Hefner’s daughter Christie, who had run Playboy Enterprises for 20 years, a couple of years earlier.

Mr Flanders remained boss of Playboy Enterprises after buying back his company in tandem with Rizvi Traverse Management, an investment firm, and continued to look for a new business model. He slashed costs by reducing staff by 75% and outsourcing some of the firm’s business. His biggest problem was Playboy, the bedrock of the business empire—and its most troubled part. The magazine was losing about $12m a year when Mr Flanders took over and continues to lose money to this day, though now to the tune of only about $3m annually. Despite its compelling journalism, most readers bought it for naked female flesh, now much more readily available online. From a peak of 7.2m copies in November 1972, its circulation has shrunk to a mere 800,000 today.

Mr Flanders decided to start reinventing the brand by banning full nudity from the Playboy website in August last year. This made the site safe to surf at work and in public places, and helped it to get onto social-media platforms such as Facebook or Twitter. Its online audience soared, increasing fourfold from 4m unique users per month to 16m. The average age of its readers dropped from 47 to just over 30.

This month Mr Flanders made his most audacious move yet. On October 13th Playboy Enterprises said that from March next year Playboy will not publish full nudity any more, though it will continue to show “sexy, seductive pictorials of the world’s most beautiful women”. It will also continue to choose a “Playmate of the Month” and hire a “sex-positive female” as a sex columnist. And it says it will go on publishing long-form journalism, interviews and fiction.

“The quality of the content was always overshadowed by the nude pictures,” says Americus Reed at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Playboy has published fiction by James Baldwin, and Vladimir Nabokov, as well as interviews with Jimmy Carter, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. (Mr Carter came to regret admitting to Playboy journalists that he had “committed adultery in my heart many times”.) In 1990 Playboy ran a cover photo of Donald Trump dressed in black tie, an adoring Playmate at his side. Asked on October 20th whether he would consent to Playboy’s request to write an article for the magazine, Mr Trump replied that maybe he will pass. “It’s not the same Playboy. In those days that was the hottest thing you can do,” he said, referring to the cover splash about himself.

Mr Trump is not the only one hankering for the old Playboy days. Candace Jordan, a former Playmate and a Playboy centrefold in December 1979, laments in the Chicago Tribune that the magazine’s revamp comes at the expense of the “glamorous iconic Playboy Playmate image”. Others warn that Playboy risks losing its brand identity. But the bowtied-rabbit logo remains popular, and clothes, wallets, briefcases and handbags featuring it are all the rage in China—where Playboy itself, with its alluring nudes, has never yet been sold.