Desperately trying to get your mitts on those drool-inducing photos of Jennifer Lopez in that dress from the 2001Grammy Awards? Want to turn Neve Campbell's nude scenes from Wild Things into a screensaver?
Look no further than MrSkin.com, an exhaustively researched treasure trove of thousands of nude and semi-nude stills and video clips of nearly all your favorite femme fatales and B-movie sirens.
MrSkin.com launched in August 1999 with over 1,000 stills and more than 400 movie clips. As of this writing, the site's archives had grown to include over 35,000 photo collages (all from movies) and 9,300 movie clips, with "skinformation" on some 5,600 actresses and 9,800 movies and TV shows. These numbers grow daily.
The persona that drives the Website was first coined in 1994 by a pair of ESPNRadio personalities. Host Harry Teinowicz and comedian Spike Manton wanted to showcase their buddy who had an encyclopedic knowledge of nude celebrities. The fellow was happy to go on the air, but didn't want to use his real name. Thus, the Mr. Skin moniker was born.
According to Jim Lillig, MrSkin.com's V.P. of marketing, some 15 years before the cable sports channel became a household name, an adolescent Mr. Skin was one of the first on his block to get cable TV. From the first time he saw the phrase "brief nudity" in the program guide, he was hooked. Hunkering down in his parents' basement with two VCRs, a pile of VHS tapes, and a fully stocked tissue dispenser, the young empresario started recording and compiling the nude scenes in movies, creating what would become the first elements of the Mr. Skin archives.
In the fall of 1998, Mr. Skin was approached by Lillig and a partner, Hank Butler, to start a Website bearing his name. Within a few months, they'd built the database that would become the backbone of the present day site.
Before launching, however, the partners consulted with intellectual property attorney Patricia Felch on the legality of showing copyrighted nude movie clips on the Internet. Felch recommended that they add "artistic value" to the site, by providing reviews and ratings of the nude scenes, as well as access to purchase the movies featured on the site. Her recommendations helped to shape the presentation and the content that's displayed on MrSkin.com to this day.
Inside a 3,000 square-foot office outside of Chicago, MrSkin.com parent SK Intertainment (SKI) operates a media studio complete with editing bays, TIVO machines, and VCRs and DVD players that can play tapes from anywhere in the world. You'll also find a repository of over 3,000 VHS and DVD titles (many of which cannot be found anywhere else), and a veritable army of desktop computers.
According to Trey Runcie, who acts as a liaison between the design and tech departments, the MrSkin.com Web network contains 10 servers, supported by redundant 100MB connections "for maximum up-time." The site is load-balanced via a quintet of content-replicated dual 1.7GHz Debian Linux-based Apache servers; each equipped with 2GB of RAM and 50GB RAID Level 0 1 storage, utilizing the Cisco CS1100 switcher.
A staff of 24 keeps the film nudity flowing, with 15 people dedicated to the site's daily content updates. This includes writers, cappers, video production assistants, editors, and researchers. Each update usually includes 15 to 20 movie clips as well as 40 to 60 collages of still pictures taken from the movies on the site.
Lillig says that the daily updates and a responsive customer service department have contributed greatly to the site's four to six-month retention rate and, conversely, the company's bottom line.
"Like any site, we're not in the business of giving money away, but chargebacks are inevitable. We have always had a no-questions-asked customer service policy. First, we offer the party in question extended subscription time; if that doesn't satisfy them, we issue a credit. After that, it is pretty much out of our hands."
The company reports its chargebacks as accounting for just .003 percent of its net transaction volume.
Recurring billing is provided to customers who don't want to endure the hassle of filling out a form every month. "What can we say - it's the only way to make serious money from an Internet site. Not just adult, but mainstream as well," says Lillig, who points to the rise of subscription-based services by Microsoft, RealNetworks, and others as evidence of this trend. "They're just finding out what adult has known for a long time, namely: Provide a service that is of value to a targeted population, tailor it to the needs of its users, and update it constantly. This is a recipe for long-term commitment from your user base," he says.
"It also helps that every time Mr. Skin is featured on the radio or TV, we see the joins spike up," he adds. "That's really kind of fun and inspires us to see how well we can maximize it. We wouldn't want to build it up on the radio and pre-sell the potential customer on seeing great celebrity nudity, and when they get to the site, they're get hit with pop-ups and an immediate join page in their face.
"Those railroading tactics work for some sites," Lillig says, "but we want to remain focused on our visitors' experience, not only from a monetary standpoint but also from a brand proposition. We want visitors to come away with a good impression and the knowledge that if they ever need to know ? or need to see ? where a celebrity has revealed herself, MrSkin.com is the place to find it."
Part of that experience is the site's extensive free tour. "Most adult celebrity sites direct their visitors down their slippery slide right to the join page as quickly as they can without ever giving a real taste of what they can have access to when they join. MrSkin.com is different. What you see on the non-member side of the site is exactly what you will get once you become a member. Of course, members get access to the plethora of pics and clips, but they also get access to all the archives and special sections they have developed to keep subscribers renewing month after month," Lillig says.
Not surprisingly, major Tinseltown studios have taken notice of the site's popularity. Lillig says that any of them ? who've elected to go unnamed to protect their relationship with SKI ? send screener copies of movies with nudity in them for review and inclusion on the site. The studios want to sell movies, and MrSkin.com often gives flicks with little redeeming value new life in rentals and sales.
"Every time a video gets mentioned in Mr. Skin Minute, our weekly syndicated radio show, sales of that video immediately increase on the site and also in rental stores. This is why the studios come around and look for the site to feature obscure or B-movie titles that otherwise would just be collecting dust on the shelves," Lillig says.
As far as Mr. Skin is concerned, these little-known movies with even lesser-known ? but way hot ? actresses, are the real treasures it holds. Visitors stay for an average of over 20 minutes per session, browsing the popular movies and TV shows, but also a fair amount of the rare footage that the Skin Team has scoured the ends of earth for.
Subscriptions are the single greatest source of revenue for MrSkin.com, but SKI also has established other revenue streams that continue to grow as the site's familiarity and reach increase. Ad revenue from banners placed on the non-member side adds as much as 10 percent to the bottom line. The ads are run both on a performance and a paid placement basis. In addition to advertising revenue, licensing of Mr. Skin's movie reviews has also been promising. "Already, iFilm.com and www.CinemaNow.com are running our reviews alongside their other 'mainstream' movie reviews," Lillig says.
Down the road, SKI sees international growth, producing more in-house content and merchandising as a way to remain the leader in the nude movie reviews niche and to generate additional revenue. The site already has writers in the U.K., France, and Germany that monitor which actresses outside America are taking it off, on both the big screen and TV. Already, 10 percent of the site's revenue comes from foreign visitors; SKI would like to expand its reach further by offering more country-specific versions of MrSkin.com to entice additional international subscribers.
Segment based pieces such as the Mr. Skin Minute are an example of how the content on the site can be re-purposed for different media channels. Developing "news and reviews" video segments that can be viewed over the Web, PDA devices, 3G handsets, and broadcast TV will grow their D-cup arsenal of licensable material as these new mediums are adopted worldwide.
Affiliate sales are also a high priority at MrSkin.com. Hank Butler, the company's V.P. of sales, has been extremely pleased with the performance of the site's affiliates. Accounting for over 20 percent of MrSkin.com's annual revenue, affiliates and partner channels like FlashCash and Join4Free help to expose the site to the far reaches of the adult surfer community. "We are constantly developing new content modules for affiliates to use to enhance their own site's content offerings as well as increasing conversions from their site to ours," says Butler.
Examples of the site's content modules include "Search Banners" (find any actress, movie, or TV show that has had skin in it), "Babe of the Day" (a daily updated feature on a specific actress who has appeared nude in film), and the "Mr. Skin Minute Console" (a weekly updated console that features the Minute audio as well as links to the movies covered with reviews, pics, and clips).
New modules are scheduled to debut every two months. Upcoming modules include a trivia game, celebrity galleries, and a "Wheel O' Babes" random celebrity generator. Through it all, SKI says they go to great lengths to preserve the integrity of the actresses and the movies, as well as creating content that affiliates can integrate into their existing site(s).
"As the amount of content has grown, so has the visitor count, [to] over 2.5 million every month. Unlike most of the competition out there, MrSkin.com remains a true resource for the celebrity skin fan," Lillig says.
Any advice for aspiring Webmasters? "I don't know if this is advice, but it has worked for us," Lillig says. "'Do what you do and you will probably do well at it.' And a quote from [the 1984 movie] Spinal Tap that sums up our whole philosophy: 'Have a good time all the time'."
