'Playboy' Modernizes, With Caution

For all its vast size and second-to-none brand recognition, Playboy often seems stuck in a timewarp, as I've said before. But now the iconic T&A magazine is finally looking to the future -- or at least to the somewhat-less-distant past -- with a couple of noteworthy moves.

First, according to Ad Age, Playboy is chopping its rate base (ie. guaranteed circulation minimum) by 13 percent, to 2.6 million. That number might seem plucked out of the air, but I'd bet a week's pay that the name "Maxim" came up more than once in the discussions over where to set the new level. Maxim's rate base is 2.5 million (although that doesn't stop it from claiming to be the No. 1 men's lifestyle magazine when it feels like it.)

Still, it's a good move. You can be sure that any magazine as big as Playboy has a lot of junk on its subscription file, and junk subscriptions are becoming both more expensive to maintain and more difficult to justify to advertisers. When a magazine as respected as Time chops its rate base by 19 percent, as it did last year, it gives other titles a lot of cover for their own much-needed downsizing.

Playboy's other nod towards modernization involves putting more of the content on its website outside of the subscription wall. Ad Age likens this to The New York Times's recent scuppering of its premium-content service: "Playboy has decided to prioritize traffic and the ad revenue its growth should attract by featuring more of the content on its site's home page that viewers can get free."

But the Times didn't free up more of its content -- it freed it all up. (Well, all except some of the older archives.) That was the point. Clicking around the redesigned Playboy.com, you still run into a lot of places where you have to either pay up or stop browsing. How much longer will it be until Playboy concedes the inevitable and makes it all free -- and how much ad revenue will it have missed out on by then?