If you’ve been following me for a while you’ll know that I’ve been writing about cam girls almost as long as I have been a cam girl myself. After starting out on the now-defunct iFriends site I spend plenty of time browsing around the more porn-related parts of the internet looking for all things cam-girl.
At that time, 20 years ago, there was a big alternative to streaming cam sites like iFriends.net. That was the independent cam girls who used Yahoo! Messenger to chat to their fans and charged them however much they did in various ways such as gift certificates or PayPal.
People often talked about how to use their webcam on Yahoo! Messenger as it wasn’t obvious. And people wanted also to know how to be or to find independent cam girls.
Cam girls working like this were often called “Yahoo cam girls”, but I realize now that the term has really aged badly and is now entirely redundant as Yahoo Messenger was shut down entirely on 17th July 2018. There was a half-hearted replacement called Yahoo! Together but that shut also within a year.
What replaced Yahoo Cam Girls? The new kid on the block was Skype and Skype Cam Girls became and continues to be a thing.
As you can see by the Google Trends graph above the peak time of Skype has passed as well and all these trends are dying off.
What is still in-use today for Cam girls? Apart from the mainstream cam sites such as Stripchat there are still Skype Camgirl sites, and increasingly camgirls move to platforms such as OnlyFans or ManyVids but these don’t provide the one-on-one experience that Yahoo used to.
I took a look at a major independent cam girl site where girls are free to advertise what services they offer and found that the majority of mentions are still Skype.
| Chat program | Monodocamgirls mentions |
|---|---|
| Skype | 5550 |
| 1950 | |
| telegram | 1820 |
| Zoom | 398 |
| Yahoo | 49 |
| Snapchat | 32 |
| Kik | 12 |
| Discord | 3 |
| Google Duo | 3 |
| Facetime | 0 |
| Microsoft Teams | 0 |
| Signal | 0 |
Admittedly this can include a bunch of false positives, in that the girls are mentioning that they will do text chat or allow follows, not necessarily do video calls. But it still shows great awareness of which chat tools are available.
The fact that Mondo is an Italian site and that Europeans are keener on WhatsApp, and less keen on Apple products hence less Facetime also skews the results.
The numbers do correlate, very roughly, with Google Trends on the subject.
Currently “WhatsApp Cam girl” is well in the lead, followed by Skype, then Telegram. And the rest are no-shows. There seems to be no interest at all in Discord or Zoom.
I can understand why Discord, which is more of a young people’s tool that the cam girls may use themselves but isn’t suitable for their probably older-and-richer sugar daddies and viewers, but the absence of zoom puzzles me.
Isn’t it a trope that all the business executives are now working from home and WfH means using Zoom continually? When they get off of their last conference call of the day wouldn’t they like to have a more fun kind of a call with a hot sexy cam girl?
Maybe all that work-related Zooming has killed it for them and they would rather go take a shower and jerk off there rather than spend more time in a chat room, even with the hottest girl.
Rich get richer except for the .idels who we pay to see by the way.
Why do I wan't the company to benefit with increased prices but not the models? Corporate greed. Not for me.
Thanks for the article,very informative and helpful. I have a somewhat personal and I don't know what to do with…
awesome
Thanks for the update Bill. :-)