Premium vs Freemium tipping cam girl show

Last Updated March 12, 2025

In the beginning, before you were born probably, there was only one kind of webcam girl show. you paid money to get into a “live video stream” with a naked girl who would do what you told her. That typically meant strip her clothes off, expose herself, and then masturbate to orgasm, or more likely fake an orgasm.

Or maybe just listen to you moan about how your wife wouldn’t give you a blowjob.

A high-tech version of the taxi dancer made mainstream by the song Private Dancer, but which actually goes back probably 100 years. The first movie about the phenomena was in 1931! There is nothing new under the sun, not even on the internet.

Now I actually don’t know much about how taxi dancing worked, probably most of what I think I know I learned from watching Shirley MacLaine in Sweet Charity which has to be a completely reliable source of information I’m sure. Certainly, the themes don’t seem to have changed a lot, even if the music and clothes have been upgraded.

What’s this all got to do with camming? I think the point is paid-by-minute of the taxi driver vs the perform-and-get-tips of the stripper.

Both of these have been around for a very long time and obviously both work or one would have died out by now.

In the webcam cam girl world, it started with the pay-per-minute of sites like the deceased-and-not-missed iFriends.net where I first started broadcasting, but that model has been carried on by the sites that started around the same time such as CamContacts, the first and only true descended of iFriends, then Flirt4Free which added free previews, ImLive which strangely worked despite scrappy video quality and Cams.com that started of as CumTV under the leadership of LegendaryLars but continues on to this day after a complex route of merging with and then splitting from Penthouse.

All those are therefore “premium” cam sites in today’s terms, or the equivalent of Tina Turna / Shirley MacLain being paid by the minute to “dance”.

Leo changed all that when he started MyFreeCams and, while nobody believed him at the time, he made the free-shows-and-tips style of camming work very well indeed. So much so that now every new cam site just goes straight to this way of doing things.

Only the oldest sites still restrict themselves to only providing nudity or sex in private shows. And even they are drifting towards offering some sort of free show for tips, but mostly unsuccessfully.

Where are we up to now? I’ll split them into two types.

Premium private show based cam sites

Camcontacts – Private shows only, just like the old days

ImLive – Mostly private shows, the attempt to do group-for-goal shows with Candy Show is not very popular

Flirt4Free – Private is where it is at, with the flirting really non-nude

Cams.com – Girls keep their clothes on and ask for privates

Streamate – Invented the “gold show” where people commit funds for a group show. It works, but privates are still the main way things work here. Working well for their gay cam site.

LiveJasmin – Is premium but wants to try tipping shows, but the girls are not keen on the idea

Various international sites, particularly German ones, MyDirtyHobby, Visit-X, XCams, and XLiveCam from Europe and DXLive from Japan. They all want you to do private shows and little or nothing is revealed in “public”.

Cam girl sites with free shows for tips

MyFreeCams invented tipping and still is very popular with broadcasters and viewers alike

Chaturbate perfected the tipping style – Private shows here are so unimportant they didn’t even implement it on mobile

Stripchat tries hard to emulate the best of every other site and to go one step further

Bongacams can’t shake the deadbeat viewers they have, but ultimately has become a cheap tipping site

Camsoda tries everything they can to get publicity and strangely can never seem to go beyond medium-sized

Cam4 ended up as a tipping site after starting out as an adult cam community site

At first with the growth of the tipping model out of MyFreeCams I thought that this was the future and that the paid show sites would die off. They seem very “old guard” today and I thought they were on the way to dying out.

But when you consider that both pay-per-minute, like lap dancing, and striping for tips still exist in clubs then why shouldn’t they both appear in the online world?

What is your take on that? Is tipping going to be the exclusive way that cam girls earn in the future, or private shows will still have a place. Now that many pro-cam girls are actually making bank via subscriptions to fan sites and selling content, whether it be custom vids or just regular production, then maybe even tipping doesn’t matter and everything you do online (preferably naked and with a sex toy) is all part of the publicity for your real gig.

@misc{Tsoi_2021,
  title={Premium vs Freemium tipping cam girl show},
  url={https://www.adult-webcam-faq.com/2021/07/14/premium-vs-freemium-tipping-cam-girl-show/},
  publisher={Adult Webcam FAQ},
  author={Hony Tsoi},
  year={2021},
  month={Jul.}
}