Saw the title of this thread and thought... Hey let's go back in time 

Has any other product been successful by dropping the one thing that made them popular?

It's probably going to be like whenever Marvel or DC reboots their timeline: things will go back to normal, but shaking sh1t up gave them a few new popular features that they'll bring back.  Now to see what the Miles Morales or Gordon-As-Batman of the new Playboy are.

Of course, the original problem still remains: how to build a financial base on the internet.  That's why they switched to non-nudity, so they would have more site traffic.  Magazines are a dying art form, and what's in the magazine is usually what's online. That's where the future is.  So they might do a thing where the site has the articles and so on and tease the magazine (which could become a more premium product), but I don't know, I don't see that really working.

See, I never read Playboy so I don't really know what the magazine is like, but it never struck me as being a high-quality type thing, there are magazines that go for 10 bucks a pop, luxury mags, but Playboy has always seemed to me to be a more mainstream thing, the whole idea of bringing the luxury leisurely lifestyle to the working man.  The articles, the cartoons, the women, it was all "here's the best of everything, and you can partake, for a reasonable price."  But nowadays, with the amount of stuff you can get online to cater to all of those needs, and with so many content aggregators, I don't know how you continue with that vision.

Well, THAT lasted...

Can't link b/c of the stupid forum censoring, but NBC news reports that Playboy magazine is bringing back the n u d e pictorial, after only a year.

I don't think it was a publicity stunt, I just thought it was ill-advised.  I understand the reasons why they wanted to go that route, no nudity = more eyeballs = more ad cash, but it'd be like it Coke switched to food... you can't change the thing you're best known for.