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Nude awakening
Chicago-based nudie website Mr. Skin recently cock-blocked a move to Maxim-ize its content, opting instead to revamp what it does best: hunting down celebrity boobs.
“I love accidental nudity,” Jim McBride says with a boyish grin. The founder of Mr. Skin, the Chicago-based celeb-nudity website made famous in the movie Knocked Up, motions me to his desktop and boots up a scene from the 1952 musical With a Song in My Heart. “You see that? Hold on, you missed it.” He clicks again and pauses to show how, in a dancing sequence, one of Susan Hayward’s boobs pops out of her dress.
“We find nudity in so many things,” the 47-year-old says proudly, pulling a long strand of black hair behind his ear. It’s this joy of finding hidden treasures, combined with his everyman obsession with female nudity, that characterizes the Mr. Skin brand.
But for a few months last year, visitors to MrSkin.com found its brand had changed: The video clips now showed actresses with their clothes on. After ten years serving as the Web’s preeminent curator of gratuitous Hollywood nude scenes, McBride was dabbling with a mainstream play.
Removing bare busts, bush and behinds from the registration-free portion of the site would lure more advertisers, he had hoped. (The naked content remained for subscribers.) And a new marketing team had toned down Mr. Skin’s signature sophomoric humor (a recent package touted Penélope’s “Cruz missiles”), issued a moratorium on the use of the word boobs and moved toward a new voice that would “combine the maleness of Maxim with the snark of TMZ and the wit of The Daily Show.” An editorial director was hired to develop content about sports, gaming and gadgets.
“I had people tell me, ‘To really grow to be a Playboy, you have to appeal to a broader audience.’ And I started to listen,” says McBride, sitting in his office at the company’s Bucktown loft headquarters. “[But] it wasn’t working,” he says. “I was hurting my brand.” Not only was the site not getting as many paid sign-ups as in the past, but he says the ideas suggested by his marketing people to bring Mr. Skin into the mainstream—for example, spending money on events like Comic-Con and hiring a PR firm—were expensive and didn’t seem likely to bring in revenue.
“Finally, I grabbed the reins and said, ‘I have to be true to what I am.… I’m not The Onion; I’m not National Lampoon. But I can make funny jokes about poon.’”
A former employee who was involved in the redirection saw things differently. “I don’t think anybody was telling Mr. Skin or Jim McBride that he needed to change who he fundamentally was,” says the ex-staffer, who requested anonymity. “It was never about changing the direction of the brand. It was about expanding it and adding more. Guys like sex, guys like nudity. That was always going to be a huge part of what Mr. Skin was about.” He and McBride do agree the decision came down to this: “It was really a case of either expand the business with a long-term strategy to diversify, or stick with what you do well and try to make the most money out of that,” the former employee says.
This past January, McBride chose the latter path and abruptly put the brakes on the “PG-ing of Mr. Skin,” as he calls it. He parted ways with those who were lobbying for the more mainstream direction, and instead refocused on delivering what attracts more than 5 million unique visitors per month: nude film clips from a database of more than 17,000 actresses.
McBride still has grand plans for Mr. Skin. With the help of Anil Singh, a recently hired 25-year-old tech whiz, McBride hopes totap new revenue streams such as video-on-demand and a mobile app that he says “will revolutionize the bathroom break.” He’s also reorganizing the website “to enhance the element of discovery” for users, striving to do for nudity what Pandora does for music, or Hulu for TV: serving up thousands of lists (“Mr. Skin’s Top 10 Breasts”; “Top 10 Redheads”) that will lead users to similar content, instead of requiring them to click around in search of their favorite hotties.
“The whole company is reenergized,” McBride says. “After all of this went down [and the non-nude experiment ended], someone came into my office and said, ‘Fur-burgerage is back!’”
Growing up in suburban River Forest, the man who would become Mr. Skin was obsessed with nudity and film from a tender age. He read Playboy and Celebrity Skin religiously. In high school, his family’s two VCRs worked overtime recording the nude scenes from classic sex comedies like Porky’s. Soon, he’d assembled an impressive collection of nudie tapes to share with his equally horny friends.
By the time he started working as a clerk at the Mercantile Exchange in 1992, he’d developed a reputation as the “Rain Man of nudity” because of his uncanny ability to rattle off detailed descriptions of any actress’s career nude scenes. “I was a fun party trick,” he recalls.
A chance meeting with a personality from sports station WMVP-AM 1000 in 1997 allowed McBride to share his gift over the airwaves—and the phones blew up as callers tried to stump the man who for the first time was introduced as Mr. Skin. Appearances on Steve Dahl’s show on WCKG-FM followed, and in 1999, McBride quit his job at the Merc, raised $70,000, and flipped the switch on MrSkin.com.
“It was one tech guy and me; I did all the bios and reviews, extracted the clips and pictures for the site,” says McBride, who lives in Bucktown with his wife and three kids. “Five minutes after it launched, I had my first [paid] sign-up.”
In March 2000, he scored national exposure as a guest on Howard Stern’s show. “It totally knocked our servers off their moorings,” McBride says. In 2007, the site seeped further into the national consciousness when the Judd Apatow comedy Knocked Up name-checked Mr. Skin in a major plot point. Traffic jumped 25 percent that year, McBride says, thanks to what might be the most advantageous free product placement in movie history.
McBride’s wife, Michelle, marvels at how much the business has grown. “I am proud of my husband; he has worked very hard to turn Mr. Skin into a success.” And what’s it like being Mrs. Skin? “It’s hysterical. There is a lot of laughter in our lives,” she says. “You haven’t lived until you have tried to keep three kids quiet so that their father can discuss other women’s breasts during radio interviews.”
And while the site’s fundamental concept hasn’t changed over the years, the technology behind movie distribution has. Clips were first grabbed from video tapes. But with the advent of DVD, scenes such as Sharon Stone’s famous leg-cross in Basic Instinct could suddenly be paused to produce high-res beaver shots.
And now, with Blu-ray, which has six times the resolution of DVD, more titillating treasures are being discovered—creating additional work for Mr. Skin’s crew of “skinployees” who pore through TV and movie footage.“[With Blu-ray], we’re finding things we could never see before,” McBride explains. “Like About Last Night with Demi Moore—you couldn’t see pubes in the DVD, but in the Blu-ray you can.”
To date, 95 percent of the company’s revenue has come through subscriptions, which for $19.95 a month provide full access to the site. (Revenue in 2009 totaled about $5 million.) But with fewer than 1 percent of the 125,000 visitors per day purchasing subscriptions, up-selling free users on new, paid features could lead to significant additional dollars.
“I think we’re just in our infancy as far as revenue potential goes,” says Singh, Mr. Skin’s tech whiz, who claims the majority of site visitors are older than 35 and earn more than $100,000. “We can be a tenfold multiple of what we do now in three or four years.”
The new-and-improved MrSkin.com will launch in the next few months, testing McBride’s theory that offering clips of naked celebrities in a more organized fashion will broaden his audience. (And successfully compete against sites like Gawker Media’s Fleshbot, which offers free nude TV and film clips alongside amateur sex blogs and clips from hard-core releases.) “The average person has a handful of people they’ll search and then they exhaust their knowledge base. It’s a little overwhelming,” says Singh of the sheer number of clips available. “What we’re trying to do is turn [the user] into a celebrity-nudity expert.”
“We figured out a way to open the vault of this incredible database that will make it so fun, it’ll be like heroin—good heroin,” McBride says, laughing. “It’ll blow you away.”
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