If I have to guess which factors could have led to such decisions then I'd say
1: coz the profits outweigh the negatives....
2: competitive benefits
3: believing that the concept of doing this doesn't have to be as bad for
sites as everyone makes it believe......working together with these sites
keeps you off them as well or realizing that the fact that these sites can
leech of your content is simply because it's easy enough for them to do it.
Another damage these site do depends on what content you have.
Playboy stuff is one of kind and so wellknown that people would still
buy a membership just to belong to playboy community.
AFF for example has live stuff, that's not as easy to rip and not nearly
as much fun to watch it when it's not live.
If you just have hardcore pics/vids and nothing else to draw members to
your sites than just that content then the effect are far worse then sites
that have more than just vids/pics.
Last but not least Playboy is a public traded company. These companies
work completely different than non traded companies. What would result
in a loss for a regular company may result in a huge profit for a traded company.
There's more things than turnover and profit that result to the value of
their stock options.
Often companies sell whatever they sell at the cost of huge losses just to
get enough people buying their stuff which eventually would gain them profit.
When I worked for private.com at some point they thought about giving access to all their sites and content for free....as the effect on their stock
would be much bigger than they could ever make by selling memberships.
that's what I'm guessing.......of course it's not impossible that I would be
totally wrong.....so basically my guess doesn't help you answer your question
even one bit.......but at least I cared enough to write all this shit down anyway
Yup seems I made again......drunk before midnight.....yay!
