Penthouse's $250 Initial Porn Offering

STOCK IN TRADE Cover art We never quite understood the appeal of Penthouse. It doesn't have any of the celebrity or literary cache of Playboy (or at least the literary cache Playboy used to have), but it's not hardcore enough to compete with any of the porn accessible via a Google search, either. Which is why we're not surprised to that the Penthouse Media Group is planning a $250 million IPO in the second quarter of this year in order to pay down some serious debt.

Penthouse has a vibrant online presence, primarily due to its acquisition of the hugely popular Adult FriendFinder back in December (that would be the site that has banner ads on every single porn site on the Internet, not that we frequent those types of sites or anything), though the actual magazine is struggling. Both paid circulation and single copy sales are down from 2006.

Not helping things on the print side: the mag is still without an official editor-in-chief after the man hired for the job, Mark Healy, returned to GQ after squabbling with management over the direction of the magazine.