Playboy SA is to cancel its magazine run and go 100 per cent digital, saying digital offered a more private space for consumers who have been deterred from purchasing physical copies.
Editor Charl du Plessis told The Times the decision to focus purely on digital was taken in August last year and was due to the magazine being unable to overcome the “hurdle of conservative readers”.
“We’re told from the consumer side that people don’t want to be seen buying Playboy,” du Plessis said.
“Digital is a more private space, and that is where publishing is heading anyway.”
He said the biggest difficulty had been getting retail distribution, and that South Africa was not so much conservative as hypocritical, as many other magazines often featured cruder material than his magazine but were not subject to criticism.
Playboy was first published in South Africa in December 1993. It closed in 1996 but relaunched in 2011, though the Audit Bureau of Circulations reported last year its circulation had dropped to 3,839.
