[ANSWERED] How to make money as a cam model?

Question: How to make money as a cam model?

Answer:

TL;DNR By taking private shows, being tipped, selling content, subscriptions and access.

Being a cam model is an exciting opportunity for anybody who wants to try it. As more people have had to work from home during the Covid19 pandemic the chances for regular part-time jobs like waitressing or shelf stocking have dropped. With the dangers of being in crowds are more apparent it seems like a good time to work from home, and while many WFH careers require special skills or training the door is always open to webcam models.

That said it is true that skills, training, and equipment can help to maximize the earnings of any cam girl or cam boy, but they are only add-ons. The basics are built-in to your body, your personality, and your style.

Given that you have those things, the body, personality, and style, then how do you turn them into money? Here I’ll break down the various ways and explain their positive and negative points.

Each cam model is an independent entrepreneur and can build their own unique blend of income streams, but the major components are the same for anybody calling themselves a cam model.

Private shows

A live private webcam show, or simply “a private”, is the fundamental thing that cam girls use to earn money. It is like a steak dinner in a restaurant, almost every restaurant offers one unless they are some kind of specialist. It is substantial, it costs a lot, and is satisfying to the customer. If the customer, in this case, the webcam viewer, like the meal then he’ll be back and may become a regular. Regulars who do privates are the main source of income for many cam girls, and as a service provider, any cam model will strive to ensure that the customer enjoys their private.

All webcam sites have some mechanism to allow members to start a private show with the model. When that happens then the customer will be charged, normally on a per-minute basis, and while the show continues the cam model will be earning.

At the end of the show the amount of money earned by the model will be visible to her, but usually in terms of “tokens” or “credits”. Only a few systems such as Cam4 show it simply in terms of dollars. Tokens can be cashed out by the model either on-demand, or more commonly on a weekly, two-weekly, or monthly basis.

Tokens are not worth as much to the cam-model as they cost to the customer, the difference is the profit for the cam company out of which they pay their technical fees and marketing expenses. It is that marketing and technical support, servers and software and such, which you need to be successful and why a cam model is willing to share income with them rather than go directly to the customer.

Each cam site has different values for what tokens cost to the viewer, and how much they are worth to the cam girl. Here are some examples:

Chaturbate:

Tokens cost the viewer between 12 and 8 cents each at Chaturbate, depending on the quantity purchased and the way they are paid for. Each token is worth 5 cents to the model, therefore about half the dollar amount that was spent by the viewer. Each Chaturbate model can set their own prices.

Overall most models at Chaturbate charge the lower prices of 6 to 60 tokens a minute.

At the lowest of 6 tokens a minute a 15-minute show will cost the viewer 6 tokens at an average cost of 10 cents, multiplied by 15 minutes. That equals $9.

6 x 10 x 15 = 900

The model earns only 5 cents so the model’s income is $4.50.

That isn’t a lot for 15 minutes of work, even considered on an hourly basis $18/hour. Although higher than the legal minimum wage, in practice it is rare to work for an hour straight. Getting 10 minutes of private per hour would be considered good for most Chaturbate models, which works out to $3/hour.

That is only for models who are set at the lowest price level though, and while over 20% of models on Chaturbate are charging this, a similar number are charging 10 times that at 60 tokens a minute.

At 60 tokens a minute the cost to the viewer for that 15 minute private show is $90, a more substantial sum.

The take-home pay for the model would be $45 for the quarter-hour show. And a model getting 10 minutes of private per hour would therefore be making $30/hour, a useful income for most people.

These figures are for a typical model at Chaturbate, and just as most singers are not Beyoncé (who mentions OnlyFans in a remix) so most cam girls are not top of their game. If you look at the pricing for the models with the 10 most popular rooms at Chaturbate the pricing is very different.

Girls with busy rooms, in this case averaging 8 thousand viewers in their rooms, tend to charge the highest price of 150, and certainly won’t go below 30.

At 150 tokens a minute, the numbers are a lot larger. That 15-minute private show now costs the viewer $225, of which the cam model earns $112.50. Realistically this is not a very common case though, very successful models who are in high demand set their private show costs this high not because they expect to get many such high paying private shows, but to emphasize their value, while actually spending most of their time earning via tipping in public rooms.

The decision between setting prices higher or lower is complex.

The lower the price a model sets the more likely they will be to have private shows and longer shows, therefore earning more, but a higher price means earning more per minute which may also be higher income. Each model has to make their own decision, based on how good they are at attracting private shows, on what their charge should be.

Earning money from private shows as a cam girl is the same in principle for all the sites that do private shows, and that is most of them. Most sites also have tipping during free shows in one form or another and this is another major way to earn, see the Tips section below.

Bongacams.com

At Bongacams there are private shows of which models earn a variable percentage depending on their status which in turn depends on how much of their profile they have completed. Each model has a different percentage, but overall the amount they payout is confusing.

A 20 minute private show on Bongacams would be charged at the fixed rate of 60 tokens per minute, or 900 tokens in total. How much a token costs the viewer is very variable depending on what special offers or bonuses they are getting and how they buy them and in what quantity. The cheapest a token can cost is about 5 cents each, but the average is closer to 10 cents meaning tokens at Bongcams cost roughly the same as at Chaturbate.

The amount the model gets out of that varies but will be less than half, unless they are a model benefiting from the 80% promotion.

Cam4

At Cam4.com private shows are a lot less common as this is more of a community site and most models will get a lot of requests for dates, for meetings, or attempts to contact them off the site. All of that is not allowed of course, but it is constantly asked for.

When privates do happen they can be charged at varying rates per minute, though the rate of 12 tokens per minute is the most common and used by almost a third of cam models at cam4.

A 15-minute private at 12 tokens a minute is 180 tokens, and each token is worth 10 cents exactly to the model. That means a 15-minute private show pays $18 to the model.

For the customer, the private show cost depends on how they bought their tokens, in different size purchases a token can cost anywhere from 16 cents to 24 cents each. At a mid-point of 20 cents each, that means Cam4 is paying 50% of the purchase price to the cam model.

Pro Tip for private shows: Always make sure the customer has an orgasm during your private show, even if you have to extend the time or give something “extra”. With the rare exception of some viewers who enjoy orgasm denial, having the customer cum while watching you helps to ensure they will come back for more. It is a basic biological reward training system.

Tips

Tips are a major source of income for most cam girls who work at the major cam sites such as Chaturbate and MyFreeCams, the site which invented tipping, and to a lesser extent at Bongacams, Flirt4free, and cam4.

Tipping is a way for a viewer to directly give some tokens or credits to a performer. The idea of a tip is that it is something “extra” and is there to encourage a cam model to do a particular thing.

Due to how confusing that can be most models have a tip menu where they list specific things they will do for particular amounts of tokens. Therefore it isn’t really a tip in the “optional gratuity” meaning of the word, but more like a set price for an action.

Viewers may also tip just to please a model, and even in private shows models can receive tips from the person watching the show.

With the invention of remote control sex toys, first the OhMiBod and now the Lovense Lush and similar, tips have taken on a new meaning.

It is normal for a sex toy to be directly connected to the tipping system of a cam site so that when tips are received the remote control vibrator will be activated. The duration and intensity of the vibrations are normally set to be different amounts according to the tip size.

Larger tips mean a longer and more intense buzz from the vibrator. This motivates the model and the viewer to tip more. Viewers like the idea that their tips are directly going to a physical feeling that the models experience, while models find it easier to have a positive reaction to tips when it plugs directly into their body.

There are therefore tips for three different reasons.

1. Tips for requests
2. Tips to activate remote controlled sex toys
3. Tips as an extra to encourage or priase a model

In the first two cases, the price is set by the model and it is a matter of market research and trailing to find the levels that are most acceptable and lead to the overall higher income. There is a strong element of market-norms in that most viewers are very familiar with the charges set by other models and if you are out of the “normal range” they may consider it not worth the money.

Credits earned via tips are converted to money at the same rates as mentioned above so I won’t repeat that information here.

Content

Every cam site lets you upload various types of “content” and charge people to view them. Content is normally picture-sets or videos.

This can be things that you have photographed or recorded separately and then upload, or it can be recordings of shows you have done.

There are a lot of variations here and each site handles it a little differently. Bongacams has recently allowed video uploads to be of unlimited size, meaning higher quality and longer durations are possible.

While at Stripchat you can now let customers record your public shows, for a fee. Or the private shows you give can be turned into recordings for sale.

This is all part of a trend for cam models to turn the audio-visual material they create into a saleable product. Sites such as OnlyFans, Bimbim, IsMyGirl, ManyVids, Justfor.Fans and FanCentro are dedicated to selling content but increasingly also allow live streaming meaning that both shows and content can be managed together.

Access

Real fans don’t want to just chat to you or watch you on live cams, they want to be your friend as well.

Whether they are looking for the GFE (Girlfriend experience) or simply want to be a more involved fan then the one thing they want more than anything is access to you.

This is something you can sell, and the most common way in the past was to “sell Snapchat”, meaning that for a set fee the cam model would reveal her otherwise-private Snapchat account and let the viewer follow her. To this account, she would then post pictures and things that were happening in her real life, or at least that part of her real-life she is willing to share.

Although selling snap still exists there are now a lot more options available. These include selling access to any kind of social media, some sites such as Bongacams let you set prices to reveal your social media accounts.

At XCams models can sell access to their WhatsApp messenger account, while at SextPanther messaging is via texting but via their own server so that you never get direct access to them.

How to make money on cam

The answer to how to make money on cam is therefore a combination of things, not just being on live cam itself. By combing the different ways that your presence on cam can be turned into income it is possible to maximize the income from your time and effort.