Lil Sugar Plum

Since I talk so much here about cam girls and how well they can do financially, I thought I may as well take a look at where the industry has been, and most importantly, where it’s going. You want to know that there’s a future to this business before you bother getting into it, and what that future is.

Thanks to the internet, there’s been a trend in adult entertainment for decades now towards free stuff. Most people know about this as it relates to traditional porn, which lost most of its profitability to the fact that no one had to actually pay for it anymore. But cam sites have been affected, too. For a long time, the “premium cams” business model dominated, forcing viewers to pay for a membership before they were allowed to see any explicit performances or even any nude models. You still see this practice in play at LiveJasmin.com, a very large and successful cam site that’s a holdover from the old days.

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Right around 2006, though, Myfreecams.com launched, and it introduced the idea of making general public shows (including whatever the model was willing to do) free for everyone to watch, with voluntary tips for the girls being the way money was brought into the system. The site itself would make its revenue by taking a percentage of models’ tips. This new try started out small, but by 2011, the now wildly-successful Chaturbate.com got started running the same model, and more recently, smaller sites like Cam4.com and CamSoda.com are gaining serious ground. LiveJasmin.com is still going strong doing things its own way, but the writing on the industry wall is pretty clear.

What’s really interesting about this is that unlike what happened to traditional porn, the shift toward free viewing hasn’t harmed the overall camming business. Just the opposite, in fact: Chaturbate cam girls (along with those from cam girl sites like MFC, for that matter) do very well, overall. Much better, in fact, than those still sticking with LiveJasmin’s aging business model are doing. It’s counter-intuitive (giving anything away for free should result in less money, right?), but the numbers don’t lie. It seems that moving away from a subscription system and relying on tips results in far greater average spend per viewer. Again, you’d think next to no one would drop money when they don’t absolutely have to, but there’s just something about tipping. I mean, think about it: you don’t technically HAVE to tip waiters in restaurants, but don’t most people do that anyway?

The Tip War Factor

In the case of free cam girl sites, giving men the power to decide how much they want to give a model leads to a runaway arms race between male egos. Don’t get me wrong, most guys on free cam girl sites (and this is where we differ from the restaurant example) will never tip a dime, but the relative few who do, often have something to prove. They want to “make it rain” in order to look attractive to the girl performing, and sometimes, they feel a competitive need to out-tip the other men. In the most extreme cases, you get guys who feel empowered by totally blowing away the competition like it’s nothing to them, by dropping hundreds or thousands of dollars on a single tip. Those are the “whales” I’ve talked about before, and they’re the heart of a successful cam girl’s earnings. They also have no reason, absolutely no reason, to bother with a site like LiveJasmin.

And since free cam girl sites draw the whales, they’re the place to look for online sugar daddies; remember, if you’re lucky enough to land one (or more) of these, he’s going to start out as a generous whale. That’s how a good friend of mine met her online sugar daddy on Chaturbate. After watching her show a few times, he became one of her regulars and started dropping whale-level tips on her. It turns out this guy is a millionaire, and he now totally spoils her. He gives her $10,000 every month (no, I didn’t add an extra zero there) for allowance, and he still tips her and pays for private shows. She has never met him in real life, and by the way, last time I asked, he still wasn’t requesting any sexual cam performances from her.

I have to say that while they aren’t all doing quite so well in the sugar daddy department, all of the Chaturbate cam girls I know are making better money than they (or others I keep in touch with) ever did on LiveJasmin. So, I really advise every aspiring model to stick with the free sites. It isn’t even just the money, either; simply knowing that today could be the day you find your online sugar daddy, meet a whale (who could potentially become a sugar daddy), or even just make out like a bandit on tips that pay your monthly expenses in a single shift, makes the work tremendously exciting and fun compared to the premium sites.

It does take a bit of skill to maximize your income from the free sites, of course, but the rewards make the effort well worth it. I could write an entire post about the strategies that will get you the best possible return, but basically, what you want to do is cam consistently at the same times each day so viewers who like you can keep getting their fix, then engage with those people (you’ll know them by their steady tips) and become friends with them. With just a little time, this turns them into regulars, and regulars are your bread and butter. Maintaining them takes a bit of work, as you do need to message them frequently and sometimes talk to them off-site (via Skype, Facebook, etc), but in general, the more regulars you can drum up, the better off you’ll be.

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But, yeah, if I haven’t been clear enough yet, stick with the free cam sites. Chaturbate cam girls just do better than LiveJasmin ones, so don’t stand against the tide. The premium model made a good fight of it, but hands down, free sites are the future of online camming.