A webcam model (colloquially, camgirl, camboy, or cammodel) is a video performer who streams on the Internet with a live webcam broadcast. A webcam model often performs erotic acts online, such as stripping, masturbation, or sex acts in exchange for money, goods, or attention. They may also sell videos of their performances. Once viewed as a small niche in the world of adult entertainment, camming became "the engine of the porn industry," according to Alec Helmy, the publisher of XBIZ, a sex-trade industry journal.
As many webcam models operate in the comfort of their own homes, they are free to choose the amount of sexual content for their broadcasts. While most display nudity and sexually provocative behavior, some choose to remain mostly clothed and merely talk about various topics, while still soliciting payment as tips from their fans. Webcam models are predominantly women, and also include noted performers of all genders and sexualities.
Background The conceptual artist Jenny Ringley is generally considered to be the first camgirl. In 1996, as a student at Dickinson College, Ringley created a website called "JenniCam". Her webcam was located in her dorm room and automatically photographed her every few minutes; Ringley viewed her site as a straightforward document of her life. She did not wish to filter the events that were shown on her camera, leading to moments of nudity or sexual behavior, including sexual intercourse and masturbation. These images were then broadcast live over the Internet. Two years later, in 1998, she divided her website's access between free and paying.
In addition to this, in 1998, a commercial site called AmandaCam was launched. Amanda's site, like Ringley's, had multiple cameras around her house, which allowed people to look in on her. However, Amanda theorized that a website's popularity could be greatly increased by enabling viewers to chat with a performer while online, which was successful, and has since had a long lasting impact on the webcam modelling industry. Within her members section, Amanda made it a point to chat with her viewers for over three hours a day. Since the early days of live webcasts by Ringley and Amanda, the phenomenon of camming has grown to become a multibillion-dollar industry, which has an average of at least 12,500 cam models online at any given time, and more than 240,000 viewers at any given time.
Payment systems and earnings
A camming website acts as an intermediary and aggregator by hosting independent models, and verifies that all are at least 18 years old. Camming websites typically fall into two main categories, dependent upon whether their video chat rooms are free or private. Viewers in private chat rooms pay the performance by the minute. In free chat rooms, payment is voluntary in the form of tips.
Tips are electronic tokens that viewers can buy from a camming website, and then give to the models during live performances to show appreciation. Tokens can also be used to buy access to private shows, operate a teledildonic device that a model may be wearing, or buy videos and souvenirs from a model. The website provides the transactional platform and then collects and distributes a percentage of the tips to the models. For public chat rooms, the model's portion of a tip ranges from 30% to 70%, depending on the cam site.
A July 2020 survey found that the average webcam model in the United States works 18 hours per week, and earns $4,470 per month. Webcam models who work full-time (40 hours per week or more) earn $11,250 per month on average. Top-earning webcam models have a self-reported income of over $312,000 annually, while bottom earners take home as little as $100 per week.
Personal connection and interaction
Performances can be interactive in both public and private video chat rooms, as viewers and performers can communicate with each other using a keyboard, speech, and two-way cameras. Within public chat rooms, the audience can see tips and viewer comments as scrolling text next to the real-time video stream. Camgirls will frequently read and respond to the scrolling viewer comments. The chatter is constant and is often led by a small band of regular fans.
There have been many instances where conversational interaction became a boon for the erotic entertainment industry. In the early 20th century, sociologist Paul Cressey noted that within the hundreds of taxi-dance halls of America, "the traffic in romance and feminine society" would become available when taxi dancers would offer their companionship and "the illusion of romance" for ten cents a dance. The Mitchell Brothers O'Farrell Theatre strip club is credited with the invention of the lap dance in 1977 when their new stage, New York Live, pioneered customer-contact shows with strippers that came off the stage and sat in the laps of customers for tips. Enabled with this new revenue stream for strippers, the strip club industry went through a period of extreme growth during the 1980s.
There are often connections between erotic video performance and the everyday social lives of camming customers. Webcam performers are often highly entrepreneurial and use mainstream social networking sites such as Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Skype, and Tumblr to build and maintain relationships with their customers. Some fans communicate multiple times a day with models through social media.
Unlike traditional pornography, the interactive nature of the camming medium titillates with the promise of virtual friendship. Princeton University sociologist and author of The Purchase of Intimacy, Viviana Zelizer, states: "they're defining a new kind of intimacy. It's not traditional sex work, not a relationship, but something in between." In addition to performing sex work, cam models also perform through their hosting duties, conveying authenticity, creating and animating fantasies, and managing relationships over time.
Within Cam Girlz, a documentary film about the industry, male fans often say that they come to camming sites as a way to fulfill emotional needs. The film's director, Sean Dunne, states of the fans, "they said it's not like a strip club – it's like a community, and you feel it when you're in these chat rooms. It's a community and entertainment that goes very far beyond sexuality."
However, Dr Kari Lerum of the University of Washington suggests that men are more open and vulnerable in cam rooms than in strip clubs, and can become very invested in relationships which only exist on the screen. This proposition was supported by a 2019 study of over 6,000 webcam users by the webcam platform Stripchat. The study found that over 40% of its users had developed significant relationships with their cam models, ranging from friendship to deep emotional connections.
Terminology
The term webcam is a clipped compound, combining the terms World Wide Web and video camera.
When webcam models create live webcasts, the activity is known as camming. A third-party hosting website which transmits multiple webcam models' video-streams is known as a camming site. Webcam models mostly perform individually in separate video chat rooms, frequently referred to as rooms.
The generally derogatory and pejorativeChua, Grace. (July 30, 2006) The Straits Times "Look, it's me - Babes who blog"Oppert, Allan; Mullens, Ken. (November 14, 2004) Sunday Mail (Adelaide) "Surviving a great white: How it feels to be a webcam girl". Section: Features2; Page 66. (writing, "The first lot of cam girls coined the phrase "cam whores" as a bit of a tongue-in-cheek thing. [In 1999, we] were whoring ourselves for hits, getting on cam and flirting.") term camwhore was used in print as early as November 2001.Torpy, Kathryn. (November 10, 2001) The Courier-Mail "Virtual lolitas" Page 4. While commonly applied to sexually explicit performers, the term has also been applied to non-explicit female livestreamers on platforms such as Twitch and YouTube.
Camming industry As of 2016, the money generated by camming sites was upwards of $2 billion (USD) annually, and the pornography business as a whole is estimated to be about $5 billion. According to the web traffic analysis service Compete.com, LiveJasmin generates more than 9 million unique viewers a month. Similar webcam model hosting sites such as Chaturbate, Cam4, and MyFreeCams boast 4.1 million, 3.7 million and 2 million unique monthly visitors, respectively. Certain hosting sites such as the aforementioned Chaturbate, LiveJasmin, ManyVids, and many other providers also offer payment in cryptocurrency.
The decentralized business model of camming has upended the pornography industry in multiple ways. Camming revenue has been severely cutting into the profits of the pornographic movie business, which has also been eroded for several years by piracy and the distribution of free sexual content on the Internet. The pornographic film industry used to be male-dominated (except for the performers). Since camming usually only requires a video camera, broadband service, and a computer, there has now been a power reversal, and female webcam performers have been driving the industry. Todd Blatt, a former pornographic movie producer, has said, "If you're the middle guy who has been eating off this industry for 20 years, it's a big change. The girls don't need anybody."
The new revolution that the decentralized camming industry has brought also challenged many cultural stereotypes concerning both the camgirls and their customers. Ethnography researcher Dr. Theresa Senft became a camgirl for a year while doing four years of research for her 2008 book, Camgirls: Celebrity and Community in the Age of Social Networks. Senft has described herself as "the first academic camgirl" while becoming a "camgirl writing about camgirls." Anna Katzen, a camgirl who has a postgraduate degree from Harvard, stated during an interview:
Furthermore, she states that:
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the webcamming industry experienced explosive growth. The popular platform OnlyFans reported $2.4 billion in transactions in 2020, a 600% increase from 2019. This was driven in part by a large influx of new creators with little or no previous experience in sex work who joined the platform due to unemployment.
Hosting websites
Webcam models typically make use of third-party websites to stream their real-time video performances on the Internet. Some sites charge viewers a fixed fee per minute, although many allow free access for unregistered visitors.Prager, Michael. (May 29, 2002) Boston Globe Wired now looks as good as it is. Section: Li';l'kving; Pge D4. These Internet hosting websites, known as camming sites, take care of the technical work hosting the video feed broadcast, processing payments, providing an intuitive interface, advertising so that the cam model only has to focus on the actual shows for their video chat room. A fee can be charged for service as a percentage of the revenue made by the model. To improve security and anonymity, some webcamming services (such as Live Stars) use blockchain technology to handle the payment and to protect the model's entered personal information. SpankChain is another similar camming site and cryptocurrency.
By presenting hundreds of different models via individual chat rooms, a camming site becomes a talent aggregator and middleman. Though a camming website may carry many hundreds of models, they frequently provide an interface for the viewer to easily switch between the most-visited models' rooms, and said interface occasionally resembles the multiple channel selection of cable television.
Most cam models are independent contractors for camming sites, and are usually not employees.