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Playboy Enterprises, Inc. is a privately held global media and lifestyle company founded by Hugh Marston Hefner to manage the Playboy magazine empire. Its programming and content are available worldwide on television networks, Websites, mobile platforms and radio. Today, Playboy Enterprises, Inc., together with its subsidiaries, engages in the development and distribution of adult entertainment. The Playboy brand is one of the most widely recognized and popular brands in the world. The company is structured with three business segments: Publishing (which manages the magazine), Entertainment (which controls electronic assets), and Licensing (which licenses the Playboy name and bunny logo to third parties).

Sales of Playboy magazine peaked in 1972 at over 7 million copies and then declined as the market shifted to "laddy" magazines such as Maxim. The company now derives only one-third of its revenues from Playboy magazine, with the other two-thirds from the dissemination of adult content in electronic form, such as television, the internet and DVDs. Much of this electronic revenue comes not from the soft nude imagery which made the magazine famous, but from hardcore pornography connected with the company's ownership of Spice Digital Networks, Club Jenna, and Adult.com

At one point Playboy Enterprises, Inc. maintained a mirror service on their network for open source software used by the network administrators by using spare resources at no extra cost. However, this mirror service is no longer active.

Playboy Enterprises, Inc. occupies the top office floors of 680 N. Lake Shore Drive (formerly 666 N. Lake Shore Drive) in Chicago's Streeterville neighborhood within the Near North Side community area. The company employed 782 full-time employees at the end of 2006.