Marc Bell, a Boca Raton financier and founder of Internet pioneer Globix, has bought Penthouse with plans to reshape the magazine into a softer-core magazine along the line of Maxim and FHM, according to published reports.
"We want to realign the magazine and take it to the center," Bell told the Miami Herald. "It's got very hardcore and lost a lot of readership because of that."
His Marc Bell Capital Partners firm is leading a team that has 89 percent of Penthouse's $45 million in bonds, and plans to pour up to $50 million into turning the magazine around, the Herald said.
Penthouse's parent, General Media, filed for bankruptcy last August when it couldn't meet bond payments. Penthouse founder and publisher Bob Guccione, who now lives as a Manhattan recluse, will reportedly stay as Penthouse's publisher emeritus for another decade under the Bell plan, the Herald added.
Bell's reorganization plan got a judge's approval in January, and his group will own the magazine, its subscription Internet sites, video and DVD production and distribution, and licensing of the Penthouse brand. Founded in 1965, the magazine's circulation is now said to be 460,000, compared to 5.2 million in the magazine's heyday. Analysts and Guccione alike have blamed the circulation hit on the adult Internet's rise as well as adult satellite and cable television channels.
Bell may not just be playing a hunch in remaking Penthouse into a softer core magazine. University of Mississippi magazine analyst Samir Husni told the Herald that Penthouse has been "completely pornographic since December 1998," and that the magazine as it now is "is not salvageable." By contrast, he said, Playboy – which Penthouse was created to compete with – is and has remained "more erotic than pornographic," Husni told the paper.
But Bell may be taking a gamble regardless, because of the image problem Husni described. Another analyst, Media Industry Newsletter editor in chief Steve Cohen, told the Herald advertisers might still have a difficult time accepting a new Penthouse because the old image will be hard enough to overcome. "Penthouse has a very negative image for a lot of people," he told the paper. "Mainstream advertisers won't touch them."
