About six months ago, I wrote an email about a prurient new obsession I had developed with the YouTube channel Soft White Underbelly.
Soft White Underbelly features thousands of in-depth interviews with people on the outside of mainstream society:
Drug addicts… homeless people… prostitutes… escorts… child abuse victims… inbred Appalachian families… gang members… a high-level mob boss… a strychnine-drinking Pentecostal preacher… a conman who ran real-estate frauds totaling in the tens of millions of dollars.
Then, a couple days ago, I read that YouTube had demonetized Soft White Underbelly.
SFU videos are still available to watch on YouTube. But they won’t come with any ads, and so they won’t make any money for Mark Laita, the photographer behind the Soft White Underbelly channel.
I tried to do some back-of-the-envelope math for how much money that actually was.
Over the past 30 days, Soft White Underbelly had a bit more than 12M views. Using the low-end rate of $3/1k YouTube views, that comes out to $36,000 over those 30 days, or about $430k per year.
That’s a sizeable chunk of cash to disappear from one day to the next.
My point?
I guess I could tell you the same old story, one you’ve probably heard a million times before:
Don’t rely on anybody else’s platform. Have your own platform — such as an email list — which you control.
The trouble is, Mark Laita already has that. He has his own site, where you can subscribe for $8/month to get all that stuff that’s on YouTube, plus some “exclusive content” in the form of more videos exactly like the stuff that’s on YouTube.
The welcome video to the SFU YouTube channel invites you to subscribe on the paid site. And in that video about being demonetized, Mark also tells people who can afford to do so to get the paid subscription.
Will that replace the income from YouTube?
I have my doubts, for several reasons. The most important reason is this:
It’s hard to sell the exact same thing you’re giving away for free. It’s even harder to sell it there’s a bunch of your free stuff still lying around.
That’s just human nature.
Laziness. Entitlement. Plus, a bit of common sense. If there are already thousands of prurient Soft White Underbelly videos on YouTube, most of which I haven’t watched, why should I pay to get a few more each month?
But here’s what I would tell Mark Laita, and maybe you, if you’re in a similar situation:
This is not really a big problem.
Because it’s easy to sell a slightly different thing to what you’re giving away for free. You can even sell almost the exact same thing, only renamed and repackaged in a sexy way.
So for example, Mark Laita has thousands of video interviews. Instead of selling more of the same, he could repackage some of that content in a different ways:
* He could sell a coffee table book of photography — stills from his videos. (He already has these photos in the videos themselves.)
* He could sell transcripts, packaged up as fancy printed books, or low-end kindle ebooks.
* He could create “themed documentaries” which are really his different videos pasted together. The effect of absentee fathers… the drug scene in east LA… massage parlor confessions.
Of course, there are also many other things Mark could sell congruently on the back end of his YouTube Channel. The above are just a few ideas for things he could sell with practically no additional thought or work.
So like I said, that’s my advice for you too, in case you create a lot of content, which isn’t making you money direct now.
Take that free content, repacakge it, rename it, and stick a (preferably large) price tag on it.
People will buy it, and get value out of it, even if you gave it away for free before.
Of course, maybe you are too close to your own content to see how it could be repackaged or renamed in the most sexy and profitable way. You might be able to find some good ideas on that in my free daily email newsletter. Click here to sign up for it.