Hugh Hefner was a surprising patron of the arts. Playboy made so much money that he poured it into funding some amazing writing (while the standard joke was “I read Playboy for the articles,” the articles were generally quite amazing) not to mention funding some significant work in printing and typographic technology (one example: the magazine used Palatino for its text and when the type on the gravure pages didn’t match the type on the offset pages, they had a custom version of Palatino made to correct the discrepancy).
Those three are still the top tier, at least when it comes to money for short fiction, although it’s depressing to read stuff from the 30s which has dollar amounts attached to publications and realize that even in nominal dollars, those would be better paychecks than most writers receive today.
Nowadays I think people just lump it into the same category as other mass-market brown-paper-cover mags from gas stations like Penthouse and Hustler, but Playboy really was different.
Hefner set out to create a respectable, top-tier publication -- by design -- that just happened to also include nudity. "Golden age" Playboy pictorials were pretty tame and generally tasteful, and they were in a magazine that'd have (as noted) top-tier fiction, excellent reporting, and high-profile interviews.
I was going to say that the print magazine was defunct, but apparently they‘re relaunching it as an annual. I don’t think that the literary side of things continued during their online-only era, but I could be wrong.
There used to be (not sure if it’s still there) a newsstand near one of the “L” stations in downtown Chicago that sold primarily porno mags, but it’s been a long time since I’ve boarded by that station and whenever I’m near there, I always forget to check to see if it’s still there. It was the subject of the first poem I wrote in my Chicago sonnets sequence¹ although that one remains unpublished.
* The New Yorker * Harper's * The Atlantic * and, believe it or not, Playboy
In re: the latter, see https://ew.com/books/playboy-hugh-hefner-famous-authors/