Penthouse magazine's decline & demise
• Amorous Capitalism
Penthouse goes the way of all fleshPenthouse, the few-holds-barred men's magazine founded by Bob Guccione, is up for sale.
The magazine, which has struggled with a steep drop in circulation, is being sold as part of a deal between parent company General Media Inc and creditors.
Guccione, a photographer, started Penthouse in 1965.
Along with Playboy's Hugh Hefner and Hustler magazine's Larry Flynt, he became one of the most famous publishers in the world of adult magazines.
But sales of Penthouse have dropped sharply in recent years.
The story is the same at Playboy, which marks its 50th year this year. Playboy's sales are half their peak in the early 1970s.
Playboy Inc hasn't posted an annual profit since 1999.
In addition to losing customers to an array of adult material available on the internet, many younger men have gravitated toward less sexually graphic and more celebrity-oriented magazines.
And on the internet, porn seems to lurk around every corner: in 1997 there were about 20,000 registered pornographic websites, now there are said to be more than 300,000, and the number is growing every week. Of the UK's 10 million regular internet users, more than a third log on to porn sites, it is claimed. Having seen the circulation of his magazine drop from five million to around a tenth of that, Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione has admitted there is now "no future" for mass market adult magazines because technology can sate all our desires.
Natasha Walter, Evening Standard: Is porn now respectable?
Two years ago, I was sitting in the office of a Penthouse colleague, senior editor Ed Dwyer, and midway through a story idea meeting he started telling me all about it. "Yep, we have lots of debts that we can't pay. Plus, Bob is sick. They say the cancer is in remission. But I'm not sure if any of us believe that." ... .
I will certainly miss it. For three years, I had been on the payroll of Penthouse's parent company, General Media Communications, headed by the chairman of the board himself, Bob Guccione. My gig was covering the adult film industry and my column, Cinema Blue, ran in Penthouse Variations, the digest-sized sister publication ... dedicated to "alternative sexual practices".
From April 1999 to April 2002, I spent many hours interviewing porn stars, attending porn shoots and generally imbibing the wacky world of X-rated entertainment. My first piece ran in the October 1999 issue — a first-person, fly-on-the-wall reportage on the set of the film Flesh For Fantasy. .
This was followed in subsequent months by my interviews with the A-list adult actresses (Asia Carrera, Jill Kelly, Silvia Saint, Nina Hartley, Jenna Jameson, to cite a few) and I learned what an exquisite craft it was to hone a 3,000-word feature about hardcore erotica. Money aside, the biggest perk actually was every journalist's dream: Because I represented Penthouse, I always got my calls returned. ... .
Questions rose about the high overheads; Penthouse treated its writers incredibly well, assigning feature pieces that paid US$3,000 to US$5,000. I'd hoped it would survive the onslaught of the "mags for lads" and their popular "bits-and-blurb" format. FHM, Maxim and Stuff have succeeded because market studies show that guys 18 to 34 won't read big stories and they want pieces broken up. But Penthouse refused to change with the times.
The easy access to free porn on the Web is a major reason for the plight of hardcore erotic print magazines. Where it was once a joke that men read men's magazines for the articles, it wasn't funny anymore since no one needed to read now — they can get the pictures for free elsewhere. ...
Drew McKenzie in Los Angeles: A former Penthouse columnist reflects on the demise of the 'gentlemen's magazine' and the end of an era in publishing
Comments
Posted by: tom fay | January 22, 2004 07:45 AM