Soft White Underbelly

The trouble with selling prostitute interviews you gave away for free

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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.

Sub-format trumps copy

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The point of today’s email may be very obvious to you. But it wasn’t obvious to me, not for a good many years. And yet it’s very valuable — the numbers don’t lie. See if you agree:

​​I recently wrote about Joe Sugarman’s BluBlockers infomercial. It had a candid camera feel – Joe going up to people on the street, giving them a pair of BluBlockers to try, and recording them as they look around in wonder and say, “Wow, it’s so much sharper! Brighter, too!”

What I didn’t write about recently, but found interesting nonetheless, was a presentation given by top copywriter Evaldo Albuquerque. Evaldo was talking about tips and tricks to make an interview-style VSL a big success.

And then, there was an email I wrote a couple years ago about video ads my clients at the time were running on Facebook. The ads were very successful, and more successful than any other we had tried. They were modeled after BBC science videos — using stock footage, with overlaid subtitles that told an intriguing and dramatic story.

A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos likes to say, “Repeat after me: FORMAT TRUMPS COPY.”

The thing is, it’s easy to be shortsighted about what format means. Text sales letter? VSL? Podcast? Magalog?

The three examples I gave you above – Joe’s candid camera infomercial, interview-style financial VSLs, BBC-style stock footage ads — all three are formally video ads. But each is really a unique sub-format of video ads, which makes all the difference in their final effectiveness.

So repeat after me: Sub-format trumps copy. ​​

This brings me to a cool resource I’d like to share with you. It’s a steady source of analysis of some of the most persuasive, interesting, and influential sub-formats coming out today.

I’ll share this resource in exchange for something you can do for me:

Tell me about a unique format you enjoy.

For example, I’ve written recently about the YouTube channel Soft White Underbelly. It has a unique, consistent format across each episode, which I’ve grown to like.

I’ve also written about the Axios email newsletter about world news. It has another consistent format that I like.

So take a moment. Think about about a source of news, entertainment, education, inspiration — whatever — that you enjoy regularly and that has a strong, consistent format that you’ve grown to rely on and appreciate.

Then get on my newsletter if you’re not already on it. And when you get my welcome email, hit reply and let me know what this thing is, and if you want, tell me in a few words why you like its format.

In exchange, I’ll share with you the cool resource I mentioned above, all about interesting and emerging new formats. This resource might be enlightening and even very profitable for you, if you write or invent new DR advertising.

More on people’s deepest secrets, fears, and desires

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INTERVIEWER: I think finding something that helps you find fulfillment and happiness is important. And if that happens to be heroin, and you got it under control… maybe it’s okay.

MATTHEW: I do, but then it’s the money thing. It’s a lot of money.

INTERVIEWER: How much do you spend? How much do you spend a week?

MATTHEW: A month, probably $1,500. So I could have a nice apartment.

That’s from an interview with Matthew, a functional heroin addict. Matthew says he smokes heroin, every day, all day. And yet he has a job, and he does it well, and nobody knows.

The interview with Matthew is part of a YouTube channel called Soft White Underbelly.

I discovered Soft White Underbelly a few weeks ago. It features hundreds or maybe thousands of in-depth interviews with drug addicts, homeless people, child abuse victims, prostitutes, escorts, 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, and various others on the outside of what you might call mainstream society.

I won’t lie — I got sucked into this channel because of purely prurient curiosity about the lives of escorts and prostitutes and even a male gigolo.

I’m not sure what my persuasion and influence takeaway for you is today. Except that, in my experience, being interested and curious is like a superpower in almost any field.

You achieve focus by being interested. And you achieve interest, if you don’t have it already, by seeing details.

I talked yesterday about how there are primal urges that motivate all people — except these are secrets most of us will never share with others. Often, we can’t even face up to them on our own, in the dead of night, as we’re falling asleep, with the covers pulled up to our eyeballs.

But the people who are interviewed on Soft White Underbelly are incredibly open about the most shocking, intimate, painful, and humiliating things in their lives.

Maybe some of these stories aren’t true. But I bet many of them are. And they’re very revealing.

Yes, these are extreme stories of people coping with bad life situations and bad life choices.

But like I said yesterday, the human experience is similar among all of us. And a person doesn’t need to have extreme abuse or trauma or misfortune to fall into the same patterns of thought and behavior as the people on Soft White Underbelly.

So if you pay attention to the details of their stories… it might be useful both to understand others better, and to understand yourself better.

Or who knows, maybe I’m just trying to justify my own prurient fascination.

In case you want to decide for yourself, let me recommend a SFU interview to start with.
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​​It’s with a black-hat hacker, who started in the 1980s by phreaking phones and early ATMs, then graduated to more lucrative and high-scale tech exploits ($10M for hacking the DirectTV receiver), and culminated about 10 years ago with… well, I won’t spoil it.

If you’re interested, the full interview is below. But before you watch it, if you want more ideas on understanding yourself and other people better — both for profit and for curiosity’s sake — then sign up to my email newsletter.