Playboy magazine will stop publishing pictures of fully nude women from March 2016. In an interview with New York Times, the company’s CEO Scott Flanders said that founder and editor in chief Hugh Hefner, 89, had agreed with such a proposal. Giving reasons for the change, he told NYT, “You’re now one click away from every sex act imaginable for free. And so it’s just passé at this juncture.”
Playboy, which was launched in 1953 with Marilyn Monroe on the first cover, will still publish provocative pictures of women, but they will no longer be nude. The target audience of the magazine will be young employed males. The magazine, which has been renowned for its famous interviews, is published in several countries in dozens of languages.
Playboy, which provided an illicit thrill to young men through its pictures when it was first launched, has been overtaken by easy access of such material online through internet-connected phones. The magazine’s circulation, which touched a peak of 7.2m (November 1972 edition) began to decline in the 1990s and is about 0.8m now, according to the Alliance for Audited Media. The Playboy website has already been given a makeover and made safe to read at work, resulting in younger readers and an increase in web traffic. Whether this change would have similar effect on the print edition remains to be seen.