Cooper Hefner, the youngest child of the late Hugh Hefner, is leaving Playboy Enterprises to launch his own digital site, which will also feature “adult content”, reports New York Post.
The site will be called HefPost, he announced on Twitter Friday (Apr 12).
Not much more was revealed by the 27-year-old Playboy heir, although the @HefPost Twitter account he created in March now has more than 1,000 followers — and nothing to tweet about.
“During the first week of May, I will be stepping away from my senior executive role at Playboy Enterprises,” Playboy’s former chief of global partnerships tweeted from his personal account Friday.
“The spirit and values of our Rabbit remain with me always, as I with it,” he said before promoting his new venture. “More to come. #Playboy #HefPost @HefPost”
According to an insider Hefner has not been involved with the magazine for over a year.
It’s not the first time the youngest son of the Playboy founder stepped away from the family business. In 2016, he had a falling out with then-CEO Scott Flanders over his controversial decision to drop fully nude photography. Hefner had blasted the move.
By May 2016, Flanders resigned and Hefner was back. A year later, pictures of naked ladies returned, effective with the March/April 2017 issue.
But replacing the PG-13 look with full nudity again did not revive the fortunes of the magazine, which has seen sagging sales in the era of internet porn, and which is no longer the empire’s flagship property as a result.
The title averaged a circulation of 606,758 in 2016 when it was nude-free for most of the year. With the return of bare-breasted women in 2017, circulation sagged even lower — to an average of 396,764 per issue.
Ben Kohn took the company private in 2011 by paying $270 million for two-thirds of the company. In 2017, he bought out the final one-third of the company still owned by founder Hugh Hefner, who also died that year.
Kohn, who is now CEO, cut the magazine back to a quarterly in 2019 as he pursued more global licensing deals and reopened a Playboy Club in Manhattan last September.
A spokesman said the magazine will continue as a seasonal quarterly, but there’s no telling how it is selling. Playboy withdrew from the Alliance for Audited Media, which tracks circulation.
