Entertainment
No more nudes in Playboy
New York: In upsetting news for nearly 800,000 readers of Playboy magazine, its top editors have decided to strike out nudity from the pages of the publication.
Last month, Cory Jones, a top editor at Playboy, met its founder Hugh Hefner and presented the idea of removing explicit photos from the magazine.
Hefner, now 89, agreed to the proposal and the redesign will be unveiled in March 2016, as per reported on Monday.
“You are now one click away from every sex act imaginable for free. And so it is just passe` at this juncture,” Scott Flanders, the company’s chief executive, said citing digitisation of sex as the reason for the redesign.
“The redesign is more pragmatic. The magazine had already made some content safe for work in order to be allowed on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, vital sources of web traffic,” Flanders added.
“Playboy will retain its tradition of investigative journalism, in-depth interviews and fiction. The target audience,” Flanders said, adding, “The difference between us and Vice — a magazine famous for its investigative journalism — is that we are going after the guy with a job.”
According to the new plans, the print edition of Playboy will still feature women in provocative poses but they will no longer be fully nude.
“The magazine will adopt a cleaner, more modern style. There will still be a Playmate of the Month, but the pictures will be “PG-13″ and less produced,” Jones, chief content officer of Playboy, said.
“A little more accessible, a little more intimate,” he added.
The digitisation of sex in the form of pornography hit the magazine culture. It lost shock value, commercial value and cultural relevance as now every teen has an Internet-connected phone instead, the report added.
According to the Alliance for Audited Media, Playboy’s circulation has dropped from 5.6 million in 1975 to about eight lakh.
In August 2014, when the website waived nudity the average age of its reader dropped from 47 to just over 30, and its web traffic took a nosedive from 16 million to four million users per month, Playboy’s executives said.
Many like Dian Hanson, author of a six-volume history of men’s magazines and an editor for Taschen, expressed surprise at the decision and asked, “But taking the nudity out of Playboy is going to leave what?”
Playboy was founded in 1953 and revolutionised sex in America by changing people’s perspective towards nudity.
Marilyn Monroe was featured on its debut cover in 1953. Actors like Madonna, Sharon Stone and Naomi Campbell posed for the magazine at the peak of their fame.
The company earns from licensed editions around the world but the US edition loses about $3 million a year, Flanders said.
Playboy has bath products, fragrances, clothing, liquor and jewellery among other merchandise.
International online casino Casino Days has published a report sharing their internal data on what types and brands of devices are used to play on the platform by users from the South Asian region.
Such aggregate data analyses allow the operator to optimise their website for the brands and models of devices people are actually using.
The insights gained through the research also help Casino Days tailor their services based on the better understanding of their clients and their needs.
Desktops and Tablets Lose the Battle vs Mobile
The primary data samples analysed by Casino Days reveal that mobile connections dominate the market in South Asia and are responsible for a whopping 96.6% of gaming sessions, while computers and tablets have negligible shares of 2.9% and 0.5% respectively.
The authors of the study point out that historically, playing online casino was exclusively done on computers, and attribute thе major shift to mobile that has unfolded over time to the wide spread of cheaper smartphones and mobile data plans in South Asia.
“Some of the reasons behind this massive difference in device type are affordability, technical advantages, as well as cheaper and more obtainable internet plans for mobiles than those for computers,” the researchers comment.
Xiaomi and Vivo Outperform Samsung, Apple Way Down in Rankings
Chinese brands Xiaomi and Vivo were used by 21.9% and 20.79% of Casino Days players from South Asia respectively, and together with the positioned in third place with a 18.1% share South Korean brand Samsung dominate the market among real money gamers in the region.
Cupertino, California-based Apple is way down in seventh with a user share of just 2.29%, overshadowed by Chinese brands Realme (11.43%), OPPO (11.23%), and OnePlus (4.07%).
Huawei is at the very bottom of the chart with a tiny share just below the single percent mark, trailing behind mobile devices by Motorola, Google, and Infinix.
The data on actual phone usage provided by Casino Days, even though limited to the gaming parts of the population of South Asia, paints a different picture from global statistics on smartphone shipments by vendors.
Apple and Samsung have been sharing the worldwide lead for over a decade, while current regional leader Xiaomi secured their third position globally just a couple of years ago.
Striking Android Dominance among South Asian Real Money Gaming Communities
The shifted market share patterns of the world’s top smartphone brands in South Asia observed by the Casino Days research paper reveal a striking dominance of Android devices at the expense of iOS-powered phones.
On the global level, Android enjoys a comfortable lead with a sizable 68.79% share which grows to nearly 79% when we look at the whole continent of Asia. The data on South Asian real money gaming communities suggests that Android’s dominance grows even higher and is north of the 90% mark.
Among the major factors behind these figures, the authors of the study point to the relative affordability of and greater availability of Android devices in the region, especially when manufactured locally in countries like India and Vietnam.
“And, with influencers and tech reviews putting emphasis on Android devices, the choice of mobile phone brand and OS becomes easy; Android has a much wider range of products and caters to the Asian online casino market in ways that Apple can’t due to technical limitations,” the researchers add.
The far better integration achieved by Google Pay compared to its counterpart Apple Pay has also played a crucial role in shaping the existing smartphone market trends.
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