Unlike what some seem to believe, paid naturist content is not something new. For many decades, naturist federations and clubs have been publishing magazines and newsletters that were uniquely for their members. Unless you paid the membership fee, or you had generous friends, you didn’t have access to this content.
For the longest time, these organisations had quite a monopoly on such publications. If you wanted to know what was happening in the naturist world, where to find a club or resort, or read about personal experiences of naturists, you had not much choice but to become a member. On the other hand, for clubs and resorts that wanted to attract new guests, these publications were the only way to reach their audience. It was a pretty solid system until the internet came along.
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The uprise of “free” naturist content
We sometimes think that the reason why some naturist organisations struggled to modernise, or are still struggling, is because there was never a need to. They were the only source of information and considered the only authority. But the internet changed everything. Suddenly, everyone could share their knowledge and experiences with the whole world. Stories that were previously only told at the communal dinner table of a club now had the potential to reach millions. And that’s exactly what happened.
When we started gaining an interest in social nudity, roughly around 2010, the internet was already our number one source of information. Naturist bloggers or vloggers were still very few, although The Naturist Living Show Podcast must have already existed. But at the time, the concept of podcasts was very alien in our part of the world.
Commercial resorts were probably the first to jump on this new media. Instead of buying a half-page ad in a naturist magazine, they now built complete websites with lots of pictures and information. Their reach wasn’t limited anymore to the members of one or more organisations and they could easily update anything that became outdated (or at least they should have). In a way, this too is monetised naturist content. It was free for the reader, but the goal was to get more paying visitors.
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The start of our personal monetisation journey
After the resorts came the people, individuals who wanted to share their own stories. For some, it was out of ideology, because they wanted the whole world to know about naturism. Others had a very strong opinion about what naturists should and should not do. When we started this blog in late 2016, it was mostly a hobby project. The combination of enjoying the process of writing and general dissatisfaction with existing naturist content. Nobody seemed to be sharing our perspective of naturism, through the eyes of an early thirty-something European couple. So that’s what we did.
When we started blogging, it wasn’t our goal to make any money with this, but it didn’t take long before it just began coming our way. As our audience grew, resorts started seeing the potential of advertising with us. Yes, they had their own websites where they could publish for free, but creating content takes time and this wasn’t their core business. Unlike naturist federations, our content wasn’t just for members, so our potential reach was a lot larger.
Don’t imagine us walking around with wheelbarrows full of euros and dollars though. What we earned was barely enough to cover our travel costs. But we were traveling full-time and living from our savings and every little money we earned could potentially extend our travels. So we started looking at other possible monetisation options. At the time, the two most important ones were Google Ads and affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing is basically promoting products and then receiving a small percentage of the sales. This quickly appeared to be harder than we thought, because naturism isn’t really something for which many products exist. What could we sell? Sunscreen? Sarongs? The work this would involve was much more than we would ever make from it. Google Ads came with a different problem: Nudity. Even though there’s no explicit frontal nudity on this website, our butts were enough for Google to say “No way”.
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Failed projects
If we couldn’t earn from existing projects, we just figured that we better create or own. The first big thing we came up with was “NUDE”, short for “Nudist’s Ultimate Destination Explorer”. There were already existing directories of naturist resorts around the world, but they all were very incomplete. We were going to build the best and most complete one. It was going to be an authority in naturist travelling and resorts were going to pay us lots of money for advertising and promotion options. Well, that didn’t happen.
We had already underestimated how much time it took to build such a directory, but we never considered that we also had to keep it up to date. Before NUDE started to get an audience, it was already outdated. And we did not want to spend the rest of our days changing opening times and prices. One would think that resorts would be happy to do this for us, but we learned the hard way that this is not how it works.
Then there was NaturistAds, which was supposed to be our own Google Ads. We figured that if we were not allowed to place ads because of nudity, resorts would not be allowed to create them either. So we wanted to become the middleman and create an advertisement platform where naturist businesses could place ads on naturist websites. Not just our website, but every naturist website that wanted to join.
This platform actually worked really well and in its heydays placed ads on about 25 naturist websites. We had a system that was never seen before in the naturist world. Instead of paying a monthly or yearly fee to place an ad on a website, we worked with a pay-per-click system. The advertisers would only pay a certain amount when someone actually clicked on their ads. You’d think that every resort would embrace this opportunity, right? Well, they didn’t. Most resorts didn’t care about flexible pricing. When they made their budgets, they wanted to know what advertising would cost. In the least complex way. Byebye NaturistAds.
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Content behind a paywall
In a way, except for the first year or so, our content has always been monetised. It appeared to be free for you, the reader, but we were receiving money from resorts and businesses. That’s the way we liked it, we thought that our income should come from those who financially benefitted from what we do. It was a good concept, we travelled around the world and made some money from advertising along the way.
And then came COVID. Tourism stopped existing and businesses froze their budgets. Our income went from “enough to get by” to nada. We had to turn back to our savings that were dangerously fast going towards the red numbers. That’s when we did the one thing we never wanted to do. We sold our kidneys. Just kidding, we turned to you, our readers, for support. This was our very last option, we started a Patreon where you could donate between $5 and $50 USD per month. If that didn’t work out, Naked Wanderings would stop existing and we would have to go back to office jobs.
We figured that it was worth a shot but never expected what would happen next. Your support was overwhelming. We even got messages saying “Finally you created a way for us to give back to you”. It’s fair to say that the reason you can read this blog post today is thanks to the support we received through Patreon. Because of this, we could keep creating content for everyone to enjoy.
Much more content even. As we were not able to travel, we had to find something else to keep ourselves busy. So we learned how to make videos. YouTube provided a new way of monetization through ads. Interestingly enough, these ads are Google Ads. Remember? The platform we were not allowed to use on our website.
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How not to do Patreon
Patreon has saved Naked Wanderings and is still one of our most important sources of income. Although our content has always been monetised in one way or another, this is the type of monetisation that some people seem to disagree with. We understand why because it comes with a lot of pitfalls.
The only reason why Patreon worked for us, is because we had been creating “free” content for years. We were known and appreciated in the naturist world and a lot of people were willing to help us a hand when things turned south. Today, however, we start seeing more and more creators looking for a skip-the-line ticket. Instead of spending years on growing an online presence and becoming appreciated within the community, they want to make money from day one.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing though. It’s all about providing value. Our value is in information and/or entertainment. But this could also be online yoga classes or in-depth research or art or whatever. What’s not good value is “pay to see me naked”. This is our personal opinion, of course, and feel free to disagree.
In order to monetise on YouTube, we have to censor all nudity. Trust us, we too think that the black squares are ugly and you don’t want to know how much time it takes to carefully place them. We could easily double, triple, or even quadruple our income by putting the uncensored version of our videos behind a paywall. We all know that there are a lot of people online who consume naturist content for non-naturist reasons. But what would be the value for the “real” naturist community?
Over the last 8 years, the reason why we create naturist content hasn’t changed. We want to show the world through our own eyes. Except that now, it’s the eyes of a late-thirties early-forties couple. We want to show you places and share experiences and we doubt that whether or not you can see our butts, boobs, or genitals would make much of a difference.
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Content is never free
There is a saying in marketing that goes something like “If you’re not paying for it, you are the product”. While you were reading this blog post, ads may have inspired you to visit this or that resort. If you’re watching our videos, YouTube will show you ads or we may tell you about a sponsor. If you’re just looking at our posts on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, Mark and Elon are gathering your data. Even the hobby blogger, who creates content purely for ideological reasons, can only be found through Google or social media.
Content is never free and these large companies may leave some of the crumbs for us, the creators. We rely on this, because creating content takes a lot of time, time we only have because we can monetise our content. So if there are content creators you appreciate, support them. If you can’t support them financially, help spread the word. Help them grow their audience. This is the only way to guarantee access to… well… free content.
Support Naked Wanderings
Do you like what we do for naturism and naturists?
Did we make you laugh or cry?
Did we help you find the information you were looking for?
Then definitely join our Patreon community!
One way to avoid the censor bars is to also post your videos to Vimeo. That site doesn’t seem to have problems with plain nudity, and “This Dude Cooks In The Nude” posts his videos there (e.g., https://vimeo.com/1029363770).
That’s true! But the only monetisation option that Vimeo has is subscription (paywall). Making videos takes A LOT of time, to give you an idea, editing a 15 minute Nick & Lins video takes 10-15 hours. And that’s just the edit, then we’re not even talking about filming, research, etc. We just can’t spend so much time if we’re not compensated for it in one way or another. So we have 2 options: censored videos on youtube for everyone to see or uncensored videos on Vimeo only for those who pay. Doing both could be an alternative, but then the question arises: What is the value of uncensored videos when we have to create the censored ones anyway?
Definitely a good point, and I wasn’t suggesting that you drop the censored YouTube videos. If for no other reason, people looking for video content will pretty much default to looking on YouTube so being only on Vimeo you’d probably see very little traffic. I was thinking more along the lines of posting on both places. I didn’t think it would be that much more effort to post the uncensored video to Vimeo and then add the censor blocks for YouTube.
I was thinking that you edit the video to get it the way you want it, giving a finished but uncensored version, and then add the blocks to get the censored product. That process would essentially give the uncensored video for free. But, if you add the blocks as you go along then clearly it would be a lot more work to do both uncensored and censored videos.
I agree with you Roger. The black bar censorship gives the impression that you have something to hide which is not what naturism is about. It distracts from the video itself. It would be nice to have an uncensored version somewhere even if it has to be behind a paywall. As roger suggested maybe post on somewhere like Vimeo uncensored and have a censored version on YouTube. You could perhaps provide a link to the uncensored video on sites such as Naturist Hub.
Very valid points, but uncensored videos are not on the table for several reasons.
One is the financial aspect. Putting the uncensored version on Vimeo would mean more unpaid work (editing, uploading, etc) to create something that will compete with the things we’re actually making money from. Because let’s face it, if the uncensored video would be on Vimeo or Naturist Hub, would you still watch the censored one on YouTube? So instead of working more without earning more, it will likely be working more to earn less.
Putting uncensored content behind a paywall would be an alternative, but then we’re looking at the “pay to see us naked” concept, which we are strongly against.
Additionally, even before YouTube we’ve never published frontal nudity. Not even in places where it’s allowed, like Naturist Hub, Twitter, or this website. This has been a strategy that worked because it gave us a genuine audience and allowed our content to be shared on mainstream social media so our reach is much larger than that of many others. Of course, this comes with pitfalls. You’ll hardly ever hear us talk about body positivity, for example. Although we strongly believe in it, it would be hypocrite to promote a positive body image while censoring our content. It’s about picking our battles. We don’t consider ourselves activists for naturism, for that, there’s Hector, Linda, and so many others. Most of all, we are a naturist travel channel where the focus is on the places rather than on the people.
Hope this explains.
If you don’t want to create censored and uncensored videos, why not post to Rumble and/or NudeTube? Rumble is like Vimeo and YouTube combined; you get the benefits of posting uncensored videos, nobody has to pay for a subscription to view the videos, and you get paid. NudeTube, I don’t believe, has monetization, and you, the creator, will need to pay a subscription to post, but the site is aimed at nudists, with the admin being very active in removing fake/questionable accounts from the sister site Nudist Nation so would likely do the same on NudeTube.
We’ve looked at Rumble before, but they have the same nudity policies as YouTube. They have the advantage that they also share the videos on other platforms (like youtube, vimeo,…) so the reach is higher. The disadvantage is that as a middleman, they also take a part of the income.
Never heard of NudeTube. I Googled it, but it seemed to be an interface for a webcam site…
Rumble has the same nudity policies as YouTube. However, YouTube considers nudity itself to be sexually explicit or pornographic, while Rumble isn’t going to take you down for posting nudity that isn’t sexually explicit or pornographic.
NudeTube is like YouTube, Rumble, and Vimeo but it’s catered to nudists/naturists here is the link: https://nudetube.tv
Hi,
For nudist content we use XVideos. That is primarily a porn tube site and I know you don’t want to appear on a porn site even if you have only pure nudism videos.
But there are channels dedicated for public nudity only with this kinda content.
https://www.xvideos.com/?k=nude%20in%20public&top
When I make a new video, I upload it to Xvideos and then I share the link to our Twitter page.
And yes, you can monetize your content three different ways on Xvideos.
You can also create a channel on sheer.com which is a twin site of Xvideos.
We get the benefits, but we doubt that publishing on a porn site will be very beneficial for our brand. For one, because we would be linking nudism to porn, a connection we’ve always tried to counter. And also because it would attract the completely wrong audience. We’ve managed to build a very genuine community and would not want to risk this. In the end, it’s not all about the money.
Posting nudist content on porn sites would only link nudism with porn/sex, which is a connection that nudists don’t want to make and have been fighting to break for years. People who watch nudist content on porn sites generally are not interested in nudism; they are interested in seeing the naked men, women, and/or children that are in the videos.
Interesting article! It’s hard to make a buck when you are a nudist! I’m glad that Patreon and YouTube are working for you. I don’t mind the censoring but I hate that you have to spend extra time doing it.
Regarding NaturistAds, why not provide another option for resorts, etc. that want to pay a flat fee per time period? That way, you meet them were they are at. They can pick from either pay-per-click or a fixed fee. I’m sure you considered this, but perhaps for some reason it would not have worked out.
Yes, the censoring is annoying. It takes a lot of time and a lot of focus not to miss a nipple.
We’re currently working directly with advertisers on a flat fee basis, but only on our own websites. The reason why we never added this concept to NaturistAds is because it’s not up to us to negotiate prices for other websites and because we would still need to work with many different price categories based on the size of each member website. A banner on a website that gets 1000 monthly views isn’t worth as much as one on a website with 100K+ views.
Ahh, that makes sense. Thanks for the info!