Naked News - History

History

Naked News was conceived by Fernando Pereira and Kirby Stasyna and debuted in June 2000 as a web-based news service featuring an all-female cast. It began with only one anchor, Victoria Sinclair (who is still with the program), and has currently grown to eight female anchors, plus guest anchors. The website was popularized entirely by word of mouth, and quickly became a popular web destination. During the height of its popularity, the website was receiving over 6 million hits per month. Part of the large amounts of web traffic in the site's early days was because the entire newscast could be viewed for free and supported by advertising. By 2002, after the crash of Internet advertising, only one news segment could be viewed freely, and by 2004, no free content remained on the website. Beginning in 2005, a nudity-free version of Naked News was available to non-subscribers. Beginning in June 2008, two news segments could be viewed freely. However, this ended in December 2009. The UK channel Sumo TV briefly showed episodes of Naked News, while Playboy One, a free-to-view channel in the UK, currently broadcasts the show at 9:30pm Mondays-Fridays.

A male version of the show was created in 2001 to parallel the female version, but has ceased production as it did not enjoy the female version's popularity and fame. Although it was originally targeted towards female viewers (at one point said to be 30% of the website's audience), the male show later promoted itself as news from a gay perspective.