I do not understand what playboy has become
 

When did thee online playboy become property of a different firm, and why?

Playboy could have been huge online.

There are sites that are doing what playboy should be doing (nude softcore pics and vids) that seem to be far bigger than playboy.

Playboy seem many years ago more interested in the brand rather than content. It seems more interested selling real items that content. In the UK you see even 6 year old girls with playboy bags and stickers on pink Nissan Micras stating the driver (who is often middle aged and rather plump) is a playboy model.

Playboy completely missed the boat when it came to the Internet. To make matters worse, the entire company is completely dominated by the magazine who gets first right to everything, sucks up a lot of the company resources and money, but hasn't made a profit in god only knows how long.

On top of this it takes them forever to do anything; I kid you not we had conference calls to decide who would be in on conference calls. Every step had to be approved by the "standards and practices" department, and then by legal. Just to give you an example, at ICS we created a common landing page that members would be directed to when they first hit the members area. This way we could upsell them before they even hit the members area. In any other company this is a twenty minute discussion and a few days of work. At Playboy, we had to get the green light approved by someone in Burbank, then standards and practices, then legal, then have a conference call to plan out the main conference call. (Keep in mind here that nothing gets done by management on Wednesdays due to their company wide weekly conference call so we could discuss what Kendra wore to the Kentucky Derby.) Then we would have to go through the tech department so they could spend a month evaluating what server resources would need to be allocated to the project, and only then could we decide who would physically do the work. Then the people picked to do the work would have to be briefed by legal, standards, and the server department and.... It took four months of meetings and conference calls to make an improvement that should only take days. THEN once the project nears completion everything had to be reviewed by all departments, and then changes made. Then it would need the final approval of people in upper management that we had never met in person and who might just kill the entire project after six months of work because they were handed big bucks to come over to Playboy from a cable company and have no freaking clue what a landing page is. If that is not enough, after the project was completed, we would have to devote resources to track it's effectiveness and profitability.

The worst part was they didn't want anyone to use the Playboy name or any of their content.

I'd say the Cyber Club was doing a good job, the fans were devastated when that was ditched

They've committed suicide. I can think of another popular adult magazine and thier huge collection of social media sites, that is pretty much doing the same exact thing right now with all of their changes in management.

Rochard - as interesting as it is to hear about stuff that went on behind the Playboy curtain, I'd be disappointed in my former employees going around making public disclosures about my company's internal business affairs and practices.

I'm no lawyer, of course...but if you'd signed some sort of non-disclosure agreement with them back in the day, I'm sure they could have your ass in a legal sling if they chose to pursue it.

term 'irrelevant' come to mind

Yes, they are irrelevant in porn just like myspace is to social media in 2015

They are a dinosaur who didn't adapt to the changing landscape of the industry. Strange thing is that they were leaps and bounds ahead of everyone when it all started and they let their brand become stagnant and slowly become as xxxtesy pointed out "irrelevant" like myspace.

Playboy has been trying to reinvent itself for years. There main site is now a blog like Huffington Post. Time to shut the doors.

Its not just Playboy. You could look at alot of big companies in adult, Penthouse and Hustler are not adapting as well as they could have either. These companies are too corporate and out of touch with the online world.

Im always shocked to see the mighty fall, if any of them just got some more knowledgeable people in the right positions and actually reinvested instead of expecting their product to maintain while they just sit back and do nothing except rely on their brand name, then most of them would have been quite fine.

Digital Playground/Pink Visual (Top Bucks). With their kind of money and team, you would think they would see tubes coming and get heavily involved in that, or perhaps dating/cams, etc - Something. But instead just let the company drop fast and hard

Didn't playboy pay damianj for consultation for a few years?

harsh time we are living here. the print industry is going down and here is just proof of that. playboy should make an online version where they post the nude pics that were taken from the magasine. if they market it wisely it can work, i am sure!

Playboy had to be now something like MyFreeCams in order to have adapted and still leading.

We can complain all we want but they had a fucking amazing run. He could close shop and just live off the third world magazines and license fees.

Never liked Playboy much. That mix between "porn" and mainstream articles always sucked. You don't buy a dirty magazine to read stuff about cars, clocks and sports.