Are Women's Magazines Getting Too Sexy Online?

Traditionally conservative magazines like Good Housekeeping, Ladies’ Home Journal and ParentsCosmo have let their hair down online to the point where their web content is more than Delish. Advice on spicing up your sex life has found itself on those magazines’ sites.

On the one hand, this seems like savvy web strategy: everyone from Miley Cyrus to CEOs knows that sex sells. And the success of magazines like Cosmo attests to the fact that women want to find that information from a reliable source. So writing about sex problems and how to solve them will lead to more unique visitors and page views of the site, along with increasing brand awareness. Great, right?

But advertisers would disagree.

Are tight budgets actually a good thing?

There's no doubt that the glory days of magazines — complete with limitless expense accounts and personal drivers — are long gone thanks to the recession. The glitz and glamour immortalized in movies like Devil Wears Prada and Confessions of a Shopaholic are more fictional than ever. Brandon Holley, the former editor of Jane, knows this firsthand.

Holley now runs Yahoo's Shine, a rapidly growing website for women, and in a NYT profile, Holley describes all of what she left behind in the ritzy pre-recession magazine world. Some of the best are outlined after the jump.