Mens magazines in the 1990s were sold mostly everywhere in the Western World. If you couldn't buy a hardcore teen gang bang movie, for jerk off to. You could buy Playboy or Penthouse and they did the same job. Some magazines in the UK were selling 300,000 a month regularly. Total monthly sales was probably a million and 2 million at their height. World wide the business was worth billions and created the biggest porn barons.
At first I found shooting content for them tough. They demanded a level hard to achieve. 100-200 frames on sides of a certain make, perfect colour balance, exposure and focus. Every frame different, all the poses done which had to be right, girls had to have shots where they looked at the viewer "Off the Page". Each set had to include Cover shots, Centrefold shots, full page and a good selection of portrait and landscape framing.
Plus a girl who was very pretty to beautiful and could "sell herself". In fact for many getting the right girls was harder than shooting her right, especially after the shooter had learned how to shoot a set. We spent more time on finding good girls than we did shooting them.
Editors had no problem getting what they needed. A decent solo girl set would get $1,000 to $3,000 per non exclusive license. There were a few paying $600 a set and they got the overs no one else would buy. So competition to get into the top paying magazines was intense. We got paid on publicatin, which was 3-12 months after the shoot. Kept out the broke guys.
A magazine required 6-10 sets a month. Most got 5-10 times that submitted, many from people who had no clue and many from people who did. Every set from those the editor knew was looked at by him. Otherwise a picture editor would look at them and sort wheat from chaff. They didn't like digital purely because of the problems of scanning a set on a disc compared to slides. Takes seconds to pull a sleeve of slides out of an envelope, look at 1-3 frames on a light box and decide if it's worth more. Done before the disc is loaded and opened in ACDsee. When they went digital we had to submit a set compressed right down to speed the process. Submit a set of only RAW images. It never got seen. Many from the Online side made that mistake.
Magazines were in profit long before they hit streets. Advertising paid all the bills. Advertising in a magazine was very profitable for the advertisers. Space could be pre booked for a year in advance.
Censorship of the magazines in the UK, was in the hands of the people who distributed the magazines. All mens magazines were sent in proof form to the distributors prior to printing. If they went to far, they never got distributed. Also van and shelf space were limited, if a magazine didn't consistently sell, retailers wouldn't stock it and the distributors would deliver them.
All started to slide when TGPs started to climb in popularity. why buy a magazine when TGP sites had millions for free. Magazines were the first casualty of free porn.