Antiochus
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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/t...the-web-with-a-crowd.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
The cam business, a kind of digital-era peep show, has been around for a few years, but as the technology has become better and cheaper, the concept of camming is proving well more than passing: it has created a money-making opportunity in a pornography business eroded by the distribution of free sexual content on the Internet.
Unlike prerecorded pornography, cam shows, which happen in real time, are hard to pirate. The traffic to the most popular camming Internet sites is substantial, with a handful of the top sites getting 30 million visitors a month, according to Compete.com, which measures Internet traffic.
At any given time, hundreds of models are online, some being watched by 1,000 or more people, others giving private shows. The money generated by cam sites is hundreds of millions of dollars at least, and very likely a billion or more, according to industry analysts and executives.
The money generally comes not from subscriptions or pay-per-view, but rather from credits or tips, electronic tokens viewers give that allow them to interact with the models instructing them through typed messages to use a certain sex toy or use it in a specific way. The Web sites provide the platform and then collect and distribute the tips to the models.
This payment structure, and the fact that the models can work in a safe place, slyly inverts the traditional power dynamic in the sex trade. A cam model does not need a pimp or protector. But as a decentralized business model in a traditionally sketchy industry, camming has its abuses, with some models driven by economic desperation or even enslavement. And some cam models discover that despite the sense of security the virtual platform provides, they still can be blackmailed, threatened with disclosure to friends and family, and pressured to do acts they didnt bargain for. Using the Internet to find a mass audience exposes cam models to anonymous, unseen enemies, something Lacey learned the hard way when one customer apparently revealed her real name online.
The erosion of the pornographic movie business has been well chronicled, and predates camming. The culprit was the Internet, which while it made pornographic content more accessible, also led to widespread piracy.
Camming is the next disruptive influence. Some content can be free to users but, in fact, tips and other fees produce substantial revenues. Exactly how much is a tough number to come by given that there are hundreds of sites, most privately held. Douglas Richter, an executive-level consultant with LiveJasmin, one of the most visited cam sites and a competitor to MyFreeCams estimates industrywide annual revenue from camming at more than $1 billion. The pornography business as a whole is estimated to be about $5 billion, a sharp drop from a decade ago. Steven Hirsch, the co-chairman of Vivid Entertainment, a prominent pornographic movie studio, said that while there remained a market for prerecorded movies and clips available for download and through cable subscription interactive entertainment, including camming, accounted for half of the sales in the industry.
Internet traffic numbers bear out the popularity of camming. According to Alexa, a site owned by Amazon that measures Internet traffic, LiveJasmin, which is based in Luxembourg, ranks as the 80th most popular site in the United States and 103rd globally. Compete.com, a unit of Kantar Media, reports LiveJasmin has around 25 million unique visitors from the United States per month. Compete.Com puts MyFreeCams at four million unique visitors per month, while Alexa ranks MyFreeCams as the 341st most popular site in the United States.
That traffic still pales by comparison to the draw of pornographic sites that offer free prerecorded content. Pornhub ranks 56th in the United States, but its prerecorded clips are free. Among the ways it makes money is by converting visitors to customers of cam rooms.
The cam model sites are talent aggregators, middlemen, but only in the sense that Apple is the middleman for bands selling music on iTunes. (MyFreeCams is registered to a man named Leo Radvinsky, based in Glenview, Ill. He did not respond to requests for an interview.) The cam models work for themselves, listing thumbnail pictures and descriptions on the sites. The sites keep a percentage of the tips, but the amount varies. Big earners can get a bigger chunk of their tips. Lacey tends to get 50 to 60 percent.
The business model has become so popular that competitors are racing to catch up. Witness the efforts of Kink, a pornography company based in an old military armory in San Francisco. A few years ago, Kink was seen as ushering in the new age of pornography; it catered to various fetishes by filming and streaming content ideal for Internet consumption. These days, Kink is turning rooms at the armory into cam studios that independent cam models can, effectively, rent. Strategically, this is the future, says John Sander, vice president for marketing at Kink. The value of prerecorded content has eroded across the industry.
Todd Blatt once produced pornographic movies in Southern California and had several Ferraris to show for it. Last year, he sold 72,500 pornographic DVDs he had collected over the years, getting $30,000 for all of them, compared with $700,000 he once thought the collection would bring.
If youre the middle guy who has been eating off this industry for 20 years, its a big change, said Mr. Blatt, 45, who recently sold the last of his Ferraris. The girls dont need anybody.
She worked in an animal shelter, making $65 a day. With her marriage faltering, she started engaging in intimate relationships online. She read about camming on an erotic story site. When Dawson went to a trade school in another state, she decided to try camming. I needed to make good money immediately.
Her first show was Oct. 1, 2010. She earned $50. The next day, she earned twice that. One night that December, $400. Then, the woman who owned the animal shelter found out and fired her on the spot, telling her only a woman desperate to feed her children should do something like this.
Economic desperation absolutely drives some women to camming. Some use it as a platform for prostitution. And some women, particularly overseas, are forced into it, sex slaves just working in a new medium, said Kathryn Griffin, a former prostitute turned sex-industry recovery coach who works for the Harris County Sheriffs Office in Houston.
Even those women who become cam models of their own free will take on serious risks associated with sex work, Ms. Griffin said. Those risks, she said, run from the low self-esteem that comes from working on the margins of society, to using drugs to cope with a job that can feel shameful, to getting into other activities, whether stripping in a club or prostitution. The still-unsolved murders on Long Island of women who advertised as prostitutes on Craigslist also speak to the risks of going it alone in the sex industry.
The longer they do it, the more vulnerable they become to going to the next stage and the next stage, Ms. Griffin said of camming.
That said, Sienna Baskin, a co-director of the Urban Justice Centers Sex Workers Project, said she was not aware of a widespread problem of domestic cam workers being coerced into the activity. To my knowledge, it is not a very common form of human trafficking, she said.
There were a few regulars hanging out, but not a lot of her big tippers. Among the missing was Alex K.
Alex is 53, a warehouse manager in western Massachusetts. His last serious girlfriend was just after high school. He describes himself as a loner, but less of one since he found Lacey. He has spent nearly all of a lottery pot of something less than $20,000 on Lacey. Shes a very open person, he said. There are no lies. No big walls.
Dr. Lerum, from the University of Washington, says men are more open, vulnerable and emotional in cam rooms than in, say, strip clubs. They can also become invested in a relationship that exists only on the screen. This is mutual objectification, she said of camming.
Alex spends hundreds to thousands each month on Lacey. He bought her things a scarf, hat, coat, sex toys and cleared out her Amazon wish list. He sent her a computer. They communicated daily by phone, usually by text. Finally, last year, he met her in person over breakfast at a pornography conference in New Jersey. Alex, who was interviewed by phone, said, It was like meeting someone Ive known for a long time.
Lacey describes their relationship somewhat differently. Its business, but also, she said, its complicated, a friendship.
Models like Lacey think of themselves as digital geishas, therapists, consorts, virtual performance artists. Unlike traditional pornography, or even old-school peep shows, the cam medium titillates with the promise of virtual friendship.
Theyre defining a new kind of intimacy, said Viviana Zelizer, a Princeton sociologist and author of The Purchase of Intimacy, about the interplay between economics and relationships. Its not traditional sex work, not a relationship, but something in between.
After signing off, she appeared in the living room in her robe. Lacey and Mr. Lewis looked at the stats: It had been an O.K. morning, bringing in around $350.
A chunk came from the new guy, Whodeybuckeye, who seemed to have made the leap from lingerer to tipper. Two weeks later, when Lacey got the flu, she did a show from her kitchen, fully dressed, sniffling. Whodeybuckeye was there, part of the loyal gang tipping her to hang out and just chat.
With the business going well, Lacey and her boyfriend decided in June to move to New Orleans. There were several reasons: his family was nearby; Lacey didnt like New Mexicos dry air; New Orleans is a destination city, which other cam models might visit to do shows with her; and she might make some extra money persuading customers to visit and pay to have dinner with her. No sexual contact, she said, adding that her boyfriend would go along on these outings.
As she pursues the edges of this new business and the decision to move, she sounds like any young person describing the chance of a lifetime. I didnt want to wake up 10 years from now and say, damn, I had all that opportunity, and I didnt take it.
In this case, though, the opportunities show how this business can escalate, inviting potential hazard by further blurring the lines between the virtual and the real.
