I had the same thought as the Boobie Blog guy: “Maxim still exists?”
He said:
Renee Olstead showing cleavage in a lace top while attending The MAXIM Hot 100 30th Anniversary and issue release party in Los Angeles!
Wow, can’t believe MAXIM is still making hot 100 lists and generally.. is still existing.
I was curious to see who is #1 on a Maxim Hot 100 list in 2025 and its… 61-year old Elle Macpherson.
Seems about right. How are they still existing again?
“Maxim has a circulation of about 9 million readers each month. Maxim magazine publishes 16 editions, sold in 75 countries worldwide.”
That’s how they’re still in business, they’re diversified and in enough countries to keep profitable. When they changes, they’ll be gone too.
It is fascinating that the early 2000s had so many magazines that were essentially, “What if we made Playboy, but somehow both less classy AND less naked?”
That’s just how mainstream media did business back then. The less naked made it easy for them to sell these magazines in any store. This was a time when Hollywood was putting actresses in nude scenes on network tv shows. They had been doing sexier material in the 90s after the late 80s family-friendly junk. They used sexy photoshoots to promote the sexy shows so they were everywhere.
They had plans to continue, but everything changed after the Janet Jackson incident at the Super Bowl. Bush gave all the favors to the conservative family-values groups in the country and they went after anything even slightly sexy. FCC fines went way up so basic tv levels stopped doing the things they had been doing. Many may not know, but Bush even threatened to have Congress look into whether cable tv was an illegal monopoly around 2006. That was the final straw that made US media change all their plans as they loved their cable monopoly and needed Congress to leave it alone.
Since female celebs were no longer doing sexy scenes in shows, they also stopped doing sexy photoshoots to promote those shows. These things go hand in hand. At that point things like Maxim didn’t have much purpose anymore. These magazines can be cheap to run and they had a lot of material that would still be of interest so they can survive online. If they keep going long enough they may once again have celebs posing again. Who knows, just depends on where the business takes them.
I don’t think it’s “because they stopped doing sexy scenes” because that never really stopped. MAYBE on the main network shows a la NYPD Blue, but sexy scenes in TV shows haven’t remotely stopped, and if anything the time period you’re talking about (when shows like Game of Thrones and True Blood and such were huge) was its peak.
I’ve seen the argument made– and I think it’s a solid one– that the rise of Instagram is what killed these sort of Sexy B-Lister Celeb Pictorial magazine. If a rising actress with something to promote wanted to get notice, she needed the magazines to be her distribution channel. But with a popular instagram, she can cut out the magazine middleman and put her own eye-catching photos where she controls exactly what she wants to present.
I completely agree with that. And I think the advancement of photo editing technology—before we had Photoshop, CGI in movies, etc.—has created an illusion of what many of these women’s bodies really look like. I’ll never forget a girl I met on Tinder or on these dating apps, and this was a few years ago. She was really attractive in her social media photos, and in real life, she was also attractive. But she had some bikini photos that were well-edited. She seemed to have a very perfect body, but in person, she had some marks, cellulite, etc., nothing that “spoiled” her beauty, but it’s a very common thing in women for many years now, in these social media photos, photo shoots, etc.