Camgirl Meeting – Date, time and place
Looking for cam hosts/models to participate in my Camgirl Videoconference Meeting.
Date & time: wednesday, may 2nd, 2012 @ 8:00pm (EST).
The place: http://tinychat.com/amanda36c
No reservations necessary. Takes seconds to sign up.
Topics I’d like to discuss:
- Overall live videochat traffic decline and the possible reasons for it (I have a few theories). Comparing this year’s to last.
- Have affliiates noticed an increase or decrease in sales/signups over the last year?
- Comparing commissions. Are the sites offering less commissions (ie: Streamate at 35%) really worth it? As opposed to those offering the higher percentage. Is the lower commission, in general, justified with a larger paycheck?
- Tube sites and stolen content. A suggestion for the sharing of information about where our videos are being sold.
I’m constantly checking stats and charts from online reporting facilities such as StatsInternet, Alexa, Compete, Whois, etc. to gather information on these webcam sites. The sites themselves never give us this information. What I’m seeing is a major decline in traffic, as well as camsite value, across the board (with few exceptions). At the same time, there are more and more tube sites opening up every day with our videos on them. The companies that own these are hidden under monikers like Godaddy that protect the slime that are making good money off our content and they’re driving more and more of our traffic to those sites. The thrill of live video has not worn off; the traffic is simply driven to platforms where they don’t have to pay us. Imagine, for a second, what could happen if we got every cent from everyone selling our content? We’d be loaded. Rich enough to all chip in and form a camgirl site that would blow all the rest of the camsites on the planet right out of the water! Can’t happen if we’re fed just enough to survive, but not enough to thrive. Will never happen if we keep allowing these sites to get away with stealing our content and driving the live cam inustry (OUR industry) into the ground. They are destroying OUR industry, girls. The only power we have is in numbers, but unfortunately, people are too compacent, too fearful, too busy, to give a damn. What surprises me is how surprised people are later when they find out they were robbed blind. Gee, I wonder why!
Just some food for thought.
Uninformed, 
mattcalifornia, and 2 others are discussing. 
amanda36c 
Joy 3:57 am on April 28, 2012 Permalink |
Hi Amanda!
This is a great idea. Thanks for taking the initiative. I’ve got it on my calendar to be there on Wednesday evening, but that’s a busy day with the step-kids, so I’m not 100%.
Let me say, pre-meeting, my BF Pete (computer geek & programmer extraordinaire , web marketing genius, Market Samurai guru & Google Analytics master ) has researched on my behalf the idea of creating our own site. Due to the competition, technical nightmare, financial issues & fraud it doesn’t compute to create our own camming site. Hey, but that’s just us. I’m willing to listen to what you have to say, and if you’d like, share what we found out.
There’s a reason that across the board camming sites pay performers 30-40%. Their costs of doing business make that the portion for paying the performer. They create the environment for us to work, which we do without a care or thought to changing technology, cost of fraud, customer service and the like. If you look at businesses like actual stripping or peep show work, or even being a hairdresser, there are costs associated with the ‘privilege’ of working. Booth rentals, dancer fees, whatever. Our business is no different. If we want to have a large slice of the pie we’re going to have to give up more of our free time. The ease of being on cam, even at just 35% (pre-studio cut) is a heck of a lot better than trying to branch out on our own, sucking up our time with the headaches of running a site ourselves.
Lack of traffic? You know I’ve posted with you before, personally I believe the dip is simply a matter of the sucky global economy and the industry being saturated with cheaper offerings. The biz is changing and we camgirls have to change along with it. Keep doing what you’re doing and you’ll keep getting what you’re getting.
We need to study what the girls who have 120 ppl in their rooms are doing. Most of the very crowded rooms are not twenty-somethings, though they may claim to be (hee-hee), so that’s it’s not strictly a youth issue. Is it pricing? Gold shows? Not Gold shows? Personality? Types of shows (anal? squirting? ): Huge fake boobs or freakish antics with machinery which belongs in the tool shed? Maybe.
The common thread I see is pleasing personality, being playful and fun loving, gracious , or as much as one can be with these hound-dogs, hee hee. In general huge success is ‘that something special’ that talent agents are always looking for . In studying the successful girls what I’ve noticed is they come across as really, really, really liking men. NOT making them feel like pervs (something wives & GF’s are known for doing, the guys are here to ESCAPE being shamed by women), not correcting their grammar or syntax. Instead treat them more like playful, naughty teenagers. As with any other business, if we want their money we need to give them what THEY want in the way they want it. No different than us shopping in the stores we like because of what they offer and how they treat us.
I’ll be honest, when I’m working and any of the ‘It girls’ come online I can tell because traffic leaves my room to see what those girls are up to. And the girls are very entertaining, so I understand why the guys leave me to go there. There is definitely an ebb and flow to the traffic, depending on which girls are working.
I am practicing what I preach about changing to find a niche. Since beginning this biz 4 years ago I’ve morphed my business to create my ‘specialty’ which is one-on-one personal attention. Specializing in fetish & role play scenarios….I make no judgements and remember it’s JUST fantasy…….and I’ve done lots of research on the harmlessness of sexual fantasies. Another change I’ve made is to make my sessions very personal, asking their names and ‘remembering’ what they requested or what happened in our show so that the next time they stop by I can call them by name (Jim, Mark, Steve, Trevor, not their screen name) and chat & direct our show together toward things which are special to them. Of course this is a lot more work than just doing generic shows, but I am a ‘mature +’ performer so doing generic shows to compete with the young hard bodied hotties is out. I had to create my niche, not just sit in my chair and do what everyone else is doing.
As for stolen videos, I can’t speak to that. I don’t post vids on any sites, and I’m not aware of any videos being captured from my rooms being posted anywhere. If you know otherwise please let me know. So I’m no help with that matter. I do know that iFriends/WebPower was (and probably still is) totally delinquent in security of the site, so that is why I’ve never posted any videos over there. I’ll be interested to hear your discussion on the topic.
OK, that pretty much gives you an idea where I stand, and why I stand there, LOL.
Thanks for putting the meeting together. I hope you get a good turn out. See you Wednesday.
PS: Domain hosting servers like goDaddy can’t be responsible for the content people host on their servers. If a judge says to take something down they will, but monitoring what’s on their servers is not their business, nor should it be. I don’t want them telling me what I can and can’t post on my rented server.
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amanda36c 2:12 am on April 29, 2012 Permalink |
Hi Joy,
I always enjoy your feedback, and though we do see eye-to-eye on some issues, others I’m fine with agreeing to disagree on. I believe it would serve us all well to listen to others sometimes. That’s the purpose of this meeting; to listen and be heard where major site issues are concerned, where our bottomline is affected. I don’t want to strategize about how to market ourselves. There are a million ways to do that. We all have a pretty good feel, by now, of what works and what doesn’t and since strategy and results differ from performer to performer, perhaps it’d be a good topic for another day, when there’s time to delve into this further.
I want to focus on what has happened to our industry and press on the question of where our content is disappearing to. Since SOPA was turned down, I’ve noticed more and more of our content appearing in untraceable places, under monikers. Like never before. They are stealing content from our live sessions and selling it, Joy. I’m not talking about the content we decide to upload ourselves. You think your video is not being recorded and sold without your knowledge? Try performing a Google search for your handle using the word “videos”/”video” after it (ie: “amanda36c videos”). Look through as many pages as you can. You should recognize the sites you yourself added content to against those that you never heard of. Some are affiliates but some are not. I have one video, for example, a recent one, that is 9 minutes and some odd seconds long, which I did NOT post myself. It was taken from one of my Streamate sessions. Complete nudity and everything, 9 minutes long. This is no “promotional” tease video. Someone is making money off of this and I’m not seeing a dime! This, of course is one tiny example. I have 13 years worth of videos, just like that one, floating around and so is the money that rightfully should be in MY pocket!
Lack of traffic (here’s where we’ll agree to disagree for sure, lol) I would bet has more to do with all the theft going on and traffic being driven to those sites rather than the economy. We’ve all seen the ebbs and flows of the effects of the economy. I saw it first in 2001 (you know what date, exactly). A slight decline again around 2005, then it plummeted in 2008 and no recovery since. Despite my efforts to stay in the game, working it, hustling my assets, evolving with the times, things got tougher.
The less people you have looking in your store window, the harder it is to sell your product. My product was out there, just not in the same place I was. It still is and it’s not in the same place I’m at. You know what I’m saying, right?
I’ve seen the old “economy” excuse used over and over in the old iFriends forums. Every time business was slow, some anonymous hosts would come out with excuses galore, starting with how bad the economy was in its current state, even though we were all full aware of what was going on. It isn’t as though we don’t read the papers or watch the news or have family or friends to tell us these things, or ever step away from the computer long enough to see that the price of gas has gone up again and ask “why?”! Come to think of it, they also used to talk about hackers going around the site like crazy. Every day, girls complained of new hackers. It got so crazy, that, one day I called iFriends to report tech issues, and while one tech guy had me on hold (or so he thought), I heard a loud chuckle out of the background from another techie saying “it must be a hacker!”. Personally, I never bought the hacker bullshit, but it seemed noone wanted to set the record straight, so the girls all just lapped it up.
Indeed, we’re all affected by what happens in the U.S. because we rely on them so heavily. I can safely say that 80-90% of my customers are American. You don’t have to be a site owner to be burdened with chargebacks/refunds due to fraud (iFriends tacks that onto their hosts who earn a generous 50%). I don’t think for a second that it isn’t included in the 65% I give Streamate and that’s still a very generous take. These guys are not in business to do us any favors. They’re in it to make money and you can be damn tootin’ that what they’re doing. In accordance with our earnings, we certainly do incur losses, on a much smaller scale of course.
I don’t believe for a second that cam shows are starting to lose their appeal or that men are suddenly have lost interest in live naked women. There is more money in having our content (especially videos) on 100 sites (royalty-free, basically meaning without having to pay us our share) than one simple show with 65% (the site’s cut, for example) from each member that joins in. They have to give up too much, but without us, they have no content. So, they keep it afloat with just enough traffic (food) to keep us alive. You think they wouldn’t do that? They are so clean and so honest. I’m not sure what you have seen of this industry, but do you really, truly believe that this can’t be happening? Why then are there a whole slew of new camsites hiding under monikers and reneging on payments to their performers? Fly-by-night sites. Why do sites give ‘newbie’ preferrential treatment (top spots to promote them) and then have the shittiest of customer service, never getting back to you when you are having trouble signing in a session? Nothing done about the harrassment you reported happening in your room, on multiple occasions? No advancements in video cam programming to keep updated with the latest Adobe Flash Encoder? Why can’t we see what time the member entered the room, in our stats page? We can see what time he left, how long the session was but not what time he entered. I asked that question on 3 separate occasions and on 3 separate platforms. Never got a response. Free traffic from dating sites and whitelabels is what it looks like is left, for me anyway (and I’ve seen others say similar things). Basically, tablescraps. Am I so wrong to assume they would feed the ones that make them the most money in videos for sale on other sites? Make them happy enough to keep producing. I want to know who owns those sites that have my videos up, especially that 9 minute one. The only way is to go through legal channels and that costs a shitload of money if you’re Canadian and with the money that these sites have, they’d just lawyer up and tie it all up in litigation until I’m down to my last penny. Literally. It’s a lose-lose situation.
I think we need to, as a group, re-claim ownership of our industry by taking down the scum who are destroying it.
I’d love to hear what you and hubby have discovered through your extensive research on creating a website, though we already know that it isn’t worth it for us, and there are several reasons for that. There’s another big factor to consider; in opening a camsite, you should be fully aware of who you are dealing with and know that you will be stepping on some toes. You have to be very careful of where you step. These boys don’t play clean.
In a nutshell, if it were that easy to get a site going, yes, of course everyone would be doing it.
I hope to see you at the meeting Joy but know that I will be putting major focus on this particular issue.
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Joy 11:46 am on May 1, 2012 Permalink
Hi Amanda,
Thanks for spelling out the issue with videos being pirated. That’s truly mortifying, having a private show posted up in public, and then adding injury to the insult by not paying you. Holy smokes! As I said in one of my prior replies, so far video pirating hasn’t been one of my issues. Probably because I’m a small time mature newbie (sounds like an oxymoron, LOL) on the webcamming scene. As you’ve said, you’ve been doing this since the late Y2K, so you have a bigger following (I also note you’ve got a lot of profiles on porn site registries, whether you filled them out or someone else did). Just like mainstream movie stars, the paparazzi goes after the popular people, not the never heard of’s. Guess being old has it’s benefits, LOL.
My first reply was to tell anyone reading your post my opinions, so I don’t have to say a word on your call. Anyone who’s going to be at the meeting has probably been over here first.
I don’t have anything to add on the video pirating issue, so I’ll probably be very quiet and just listen.
Have a great week. See you Wednesday.
PS: When I Googled as you suggested, I saw a pirated 12min Gold show, at least I assume it was a Gold show because you were talking about the time being up. Obviously taken during a paying show. Scary!
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Joy 12:02 pm on May 1, 2012 Permalink
Oooos! In prior reply I meant to say you’ve been camming since about Y2K. Can’t seem to edit it.
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Uninformed 1:02 pm on May 3, 2012 Permalink
Amanda,
I hope your (not you’re) meeting went well.
I was reading your post and a couple things spoke to me. I’m really just an uninformed consumer, but I thought you might want the two cents from the other side of the fence.
One thing that I’m noticing is that a lot of cammers aren’t really treating what they are doing like a business. There seems to be the employee mentality on most. I can point out a couple things that I’ve seen on this.
First of all, I can see a lot of complacency on image and trademark. I do agree with Joy that it shouldn’t be up for web hosting companies to monitor content. That can generate a larger and sticker issue. However, the images of any cam personality shouldn’t (and legally can’t) be posted on other sites. I honestly can’t see anyone working in your industry that isn’t under an LLC (American). For anyone that is working their own business and isn’t under one is inviting theft and trademark infringement. I can’t believe most countries don’t have some form of business structure that can be utilized. That should be enough for legal action to take place. For the Americans, I do know that sole proprietor is the weakest of options of the LLC, S and C type that has legal action because of the smallest corporate veil. I remember reading about Melissa Midwest (used to have such a crush on her) got in trouble with another woman because she used a prop too harshly. If using an LLC the only legal action will be on the business and not the person. I’m no legal expert and it is just an opinion. Also, I would note that it is like 80$ here in Michigan.
Secondly, I do think that a lot of cammers assume they know their market. However, in my short time in the industry I’ve seen people smoking a pipe, on a very personal phone call to someone else; get unjustly mad at someone for a misunderstanding of their comment and texting. No matter what, this is a service industry. I can understand the frustration from the client end. Not that I don’t see the opposite true with very mean people making comments. However, it is a service industry and it is to be expected. I’ve worked the service industry for over ten years and I’ve gotten yelled just because I answered the phone. However, I do think that the cammers are spoon fed a lot of comments because the clients think that will get them in good with the cammer. If those are your only clients and source of income their comments count. However, everyone’s opinion matters. Some just matter less when they aren’t meant to help. I just don’t think a true understanding of the market is happening. I have seen sites out there that have pseudo polls that would start to get an idea. However, it does go back to the first point that it isn’t being treated like a business.
Third, I can understand Pete’s (Joy’s BF) position. It would be a logistical nightmare to get your own site up and running. However, I don’t understand how it can’t make money. I see three sub points on this. One, the prices is so varied on the websites that people are in effect shifting the jobs overseas. I’ve seen Russian women do a gold show for a dollar for five minutes. I can’t see the people as much to know if that brings a subset of the market, but I do know for some men that want to just do their thing one dollar is easier than five to sustain a hard on. Secondly, loyal customers will go where their market goes. The people that do maintain an image and have a following will go to the new site. If the site can claim exclusivity, that would go a long way to the performers. With a business mentality, legal support can be applied. All that you would need is someone to research images and usually the threat of legal action. The next thing is you will drive down the market of the other cam sites. They are probably having a hard time on their own with licensing and sharing the profits since it looks like there are sites that just change the image around the camera and call it their own. I didn’t know about streamate, but I can find everyone on xhamser’s cams. I’m sure those aren’t the only ones. Each of those sites are in competition for each other. Thus, that drives the price down. The real overhead that they have is in part you. Hence, your profits go down. I have a lot more to talk about with that, but I’m starting to type too much. I’d honestly be getting close to a business plan than anything else. The trick is to offer something different in the market place. Also, who is your market? For instance, I don’t like a lot of the music playing. My age and fiscal status indicate what type of music I generally like. However, I can’t understand all that is coming out of the speakers through the cam. Well, now I’m just acting old…
Anyways, that is just my two cents. I got more to say, but I doubt anyone would read this much.
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Jessi_jameson 4:13 pm on April 28, 2012 Permalink |
Joy, your comments are always spot-on… I agree with everything you said.
And thx for mentioning me on twitter all the time, btw! I have yet to figure out the biz benefits of the twitter beast. I’m dumb or something. I don’t think ive ever gotten a signup from there.
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Joy 12:22 am on April 29, 2012 Permalink |
Hi Jessie, so good to see you read Amanda’s blog too! I hope you’ll have time to be at the meeting.
Even though I rambled on about Amanda’s meeting points, and sounded more than negative about starting up our own site, I have researched how to produce our own fan club shows independently, so I can share information on that on the call.
There’s a guy who has been doing his own ‘straight’ masturbation shows for his paying members. From what I’ve seen he has a huge following, even having gotten other guys into his cam site. And, as for the value of Twitter, I found his product, St8cam Lube on there. He’s formulated a lube to look like cum, which he now has film crews using it on movies, selling it online and in stores. He’s been one of my twitter peeps for a long time. His Twitter profile lead me to his camming site…. and DM-ing him about how he put his billing and streaming together to produce his own shows. Actually he doesn’t bill for individual shows, instead he charges a monthly re-billing charge ($29?) and just does a couple shows a week at set times. But even that is a lot of work (less than trying to run a webcam empire tho, hee hee). But everyone has a different vision for their business and maybe having their own shows is where they want to go. Creating a website, producing fan club shows is a great way to go for the more ambitious models. Doesn’t Catherine Tayler do that now, from her membership fan club? She’d be a wealth of knowledge on the topic.
I find Twitter to be like a trip down the rabbit hole (Alice’s =) You start with one strange thing, follow it along, and who also follows along, and before you know it you found something profoundly important you wouldn’t have known before. Admittedly, most of the time it just seems like a whole lot of work for nothing =p
I’m unsure that I’ve gained any new SM members from Twitter. I haven’t had any new 20%’s showing up on my pay stats. The main thing I do is use Twitter like you do, to Tweet that I’m signing on to SM. A funny or titillating message about what I’ve got going on in that session. I compose the message but wait to send it until I’m already up and running for a few minutes, so that when a guy clicks on the link it will be sure to take him to me live, which may inspire him to sign on and spank the monkey with me. hee hee I have notice that seems to boost arrivals into my shows. I have even had guys DM me saying they look forward to my clever tweets (and, more than likely, watching from the free portal without signing on).
One of the reasons I don’t think Twitter is a great place to find new viewers is that most of all our friends know the same guys, and they are already signed up, or have been in the past. I know I’ve had Twitter followers come check me out, maybe even have taken shows with me. Guys do tweet me about shows, so I guess that’s something. Overall, tweeting is just keeping my presence out there, for good or ill.
Wow! Again a huge long reply. I type as fast as I think and it just gets away from me. =p
Hope to see you on Amanda’s Wednesday meeting.
Have a great weekend.
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mattcalifornia 9:40 am on May 1, 2012 Permalink |
I’m picking up what you’re putting down. This is good stuff and I am glad you are thinking along these lines.
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