Dependence on Platforms A Risk As Match Files for IPO

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Getty ImagesIt’s all safe for work now.Playboy, once the premier adult magazine, plans to cover up its models and go PG13. As first reported by The New York Times, the magazine will move away from full nudity under a redesign planned for its March issue. “This means the models, celebrities and, yes, Playmates will not be naked for the first time since our founder Hugh Hefner laid out the first issue in 1953,” the company says.This is a seismic shift. Hefner founded the magazine specifically to feature, even celebrate, nudity. “When Hef created Playboy, he set out to champion personal freedom and sexual liberty at a time when America was painfully conservative,” the magazine says. But times have changed. Nudity and pornography are ubiquitous on the Internet. And people are buying fewer magazines overall, choosing instead to read online. Meanwhile, those same readers increasingly come to stories through third-party platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. Those platforms have their own rules, and often prohibit or limit nudity. For Playboy to survive in a platform-driven world, the pressure to conform to those standards is immense—so much so that the publication is abandoning the core of its brand’s identity.Conform to PlayPlayboy‘s shift isn’t completely new. The magazine re-launched Playboy.com last year “as a safe-for-work site,” and has seen significant success. “Tens of millions of readers come to our non-nude website and app every month for, yes, photos of beautiful women, but also for articles and videos from our humor, sex and culture, style, nightlife, entertainment and video game sections,” the magazine says. The company’s chief executive, Scott Flanders, tells the Times that some content was made SFW “in order to be allowed on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.” The Times also reports that following the website’s shift away from nudity traffic to the site increased “to about 16 million from about four million uniques users per month” as “the average age of its reader dropped from 47 to just over 30″—in other words, a demographic totally at home on social media. For Playboy to survive in a world where platforms rule, the pressure to conform to those platforms' standards is immense. And on many social media platforms, the so-called community standards barring explicit content aren’t that different from what Hefner felt he was rebelling against when he famously published Marilyn Monroe’s nude centerfold back in 1953. Facebook, the company says, “restricts the display of nudity because some audiences within our global community may be sensitive to this type of content.” Twitter requires that sensitive content like nudity be marked as such so it can be hidden behind a warning. Celebrities and activists have had little luck in their campaign to have Instagram “free the nipple.” Apple’s App Store guidelines, meanwhile, warn that “apps containing pornographic material... will be rejected.”Faced with such opposition, it’s no surprise that Playboy is reconsidering its strategy, even in print, when the distribution of its content is increasingly dependent on powerful, puritanical platforms. What’s a publisher to do? Print-only content isn’t exactly a growth industry—what appears in the magazine will likely end up online. If it’s going to rebrand, Playboy seems to have decided, it’s going to go all in.Playboy‘s decision may be a stark example of how new models of content distribution are dictating what content is produced. But it’s not the only one. Publishers know their businesses depend on audiences finding and sharing their work on social media, which makes “share-ability” a factor in editorial decision-making. On the one hand, that’s not as insidious as it sounds: what works in print doesn’t necessarily work on the web; what works on radio doesn’t necessarily work on television. Different media have different rules. The difference here is that, when it comes to some content at least, publishers aren’t setting the rules—they can only follow.

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