As with everything else, sex also sells magazines. One look at the newsstands and you’ll notice that nine times out of ten, any male or female lifestyle magazine out there will have a sex related feature as one of its main cover lines. Remember the first time you laid your eyes on that partially concealed Playboy magazine in some store at the Virra Mall of old? (I once caught my cousin buying one from that store. Hah!) Sadly, Playboy Philippines is slowly destroying every bit of nostalgia that came with opening an issue of the magazine.

Macho during my high school days meant being able to bring a copy of Playboy to school without being caught. Any warm blooded Pinoy who thought Baywatch Mondays with CJ wasn’t enough just had to see her without the orange suit. While running on the beach. Okay enough now.

And then came the Internet.

Type a few names (any name), and boom. Pardon the language, but guys no longer have to part with some bucks to get racy images to whack off to. That is the absolute (and unfortunate) truth.

In recent years, a lot of print properties are starting to make their presence felt online. Aside from the absence of printing costs, a lot avenues for creativity are also explored. According to a story on the future of the publishing industry in the September 2007 issue of The Economist:

“The business model for consumer magazines is under pressure from several directions at once, both online and off. Magazines have become more expensive to launch, and the cost of attracting and keeping new subscribers has risen”

Publishing jargon aside, this only means one thing to the Pinoy consumer — why spend for printed pictures when you get it for free on the Internet? The article then goes on –

“There are good reasons why magazine owners should not feel despondent, however. For readers, many of the pleasing characteristics of magazines—their portability and glossiness, for instance—cannot be matched online. And magazines are not losing younger readers in droves in the way that newspapers are. According to a study carried out last year by the digital arm of Ogilvy Group, a communications company, appetite for magazines is largely unchanged between older “baby boomers” and young “millennials”.”

If you are someone who buys magazines for the premise of “relieving” yourself, then the reasoning above will sound like crap. But hey, it’s your money. From a business standpoint (and if I were still a publisher), as long as you buy the magazine, I wouldn’t mind your reasons for buying it at all. Just remember that you are paying upwards of P120 to ogle around 1/10 of what the magazine contains. If you are someone who buys magazines for both the eye candy and the articles, the above reasoning will make so much sense.

Make no mistake about it, if you pit two magazines with comparable (not identical, as this is impossible) content against each other, with the first one having a male personality on the cover, and the other with the hottest chick of the moment, the latter will outsell the former, hands down. Straight men may always choose to buy the magazine with the hot female cover, but it doesn’t mean that it’s the only reason they bought it.

I myself spend a third of my day on the Internet. Yet, I still buy magazines. I just appreciate the effort that goes into every single page. Reading a magazine just beats scrolling through a pdf file any day. Also, can you imagine yourself bringing your laptop with you to the crapper? I didn’t think so.