Playboy Plus Review

Glamour, not grit

Playboy Plus is exactly what the name suggests: the members area of the Playboy brand, filled with Playmates, centerfolds and celebrity pictorials. It’s photography first. If your idea of a good evening is a carefully lit, art-directed shoot, this is one of the few big sites still built around that. If you want explicit scenes, keep walking, because that’s not what Playboy sells.

The front door

Like the other sites on Gamma’s platform, it opens with a dark 18+ agreement floating over a blurred homepage, with EXIT HERE and ENTER buttons and a cookie prompt. The small print at the bottom is worth a glance: the site is operated by Gamma Billing Inc. in Beverly Hills, with Epoch and Segpay handling payments, and the Playboy trademarks are used under licence from Playboy Enterprises. So it’s official, and billing runs through processors you can contact directly if you ever need to cancel.

What the membership covers

The marketing copy is, let’s say, very fond of adjectives, but the facts underneath are simple. You get photo galleries and videos of Playmates, celebrities, Playboy Muses and classic centerfolds, with new sets added regularly and everything in HD. The menu offers Latest Updates, Categories and Models, which covers the three ways you’d actually look for something: newest first, by style, or by a favourite model. There’s a video preview on the landing page too.

The page doesn’t give a set count or a price, so I won’t make one up. Check the join page for the current plans. What I can say is that Playboy’s archive goes back decades, and having it in one place with proper model pages is the real selling point.

Design and the other Playboy doors

The look is sleek: black and white with Playboy’s own Visuelt typeface doing the talking. The header also links out to Playboy TV, Playboy Live, the Shop and Playboy Club. Those are separate products, so don’t assume one membership opens all of them. The site is responsive, and photo galleries happen to be the kind of content that looks great on a phone.

Speed, ads and privacy

Load times were fine for an image-heavy site. No complaints there. There are no ad networks at all. The scan did find an iZooto script, a push-notification service, so if your browser asks whether Playboy Plus can send you notifications, say no unless you really want them. Otherwise it’s quiet, just analytics and Gamma’s usual tracking in the background.

Who should join

Fans of classic Playboy, glamour photography and tasteful celebrity pictorials will feel at home and get an ad-free, properly licensed archive. Anyone after hardcore should look elsewhere. My honest read: a classy subscription, as long as you remember it’s a magazine at heart.