DVDs are dead, pay sites are struggling and porn is free and unlimited. Why live cams, Twitter and Skype may be the porn industry's last hope.
Ruby Knox moved to Los Angeles six years ago to become a porn star. The free-spirited Native American, now 27 (though her online profile at mypornstarcams.com gives her age as 25), says she was in it as much for the self-exploration as the money — and for a while, she found both. For much of the last decade, the San Fernando Valley — porn's longtime hub — was flush with cash from DVD sales and an online streaming boom. Knox shot for studios like Hustler and Vivid, picking up a few AVN Award nominations in the process.
But this past April, she packed up her computer and and left the Valley. Now, from her home in Baja California, Knox does private webcam sessions for up to $15 per minute.
Knox is not alone. Webcams — or "cams" as they're more commonly referred in the industry — were once an online backwater populated by Eastern Europeans and low-quality, stop-and-go videos. In the past few years, they've emerged as the driving force of a new internet porn boom.
For those at the top, the rewards are incredible. A popular model on a large cam site can generate over $40,000 in a single month. There are multiple revenue streams for a cam star, including group chats, but for many the goal is to find a "whale," an online sugar daddy who might spend $20,000 a month on you or, even better, a member of "the platinum club" — the high-net worth fans who spend more than $100,000 a year.
Webcams have been around for almost as long as the commercial internet, but the days of watching a monitor-lit star hunched over a keyboard are long gone. In the past few years, prosumer electronics, HD video-streams and hands-free operation have turned the cams from an also-ran to the porn industry's financial front-runner. And thanks to programs like Skype, cams have become much more of an interactive experience. If the appeal of those first webcams was voyeurism, the appeal of today's cams is their intimacy.
A screenshot of LiveJasmin.com
The cam industry owes as much to phone sex as it does to porn. After all, the goal with cams isn't to get the customers off, but to seduce them into staying online — at $15 a minute, the sizzle is worth much more than the steak.
Alec Helmy, publisher of the porn industry trade magazine Xbiz, calls cams "one of the industry's few bright spots." While the rest of piracy-plagued porn is struggling to survive, he says top cam companies have been growing by as much as 20 percent annually. Douglas Richter, a rep for Adult Webmaster Empire (AWE), one of the industry's largest cam companies, estimates industry revenues at between $1.5 and $2 billion a year.
And where the money goes, the stars have followed. Cams are drawing increasingly high-profile stars, who are attracted to both the money and the adulation. A recent cam show by Jenna Jameson on AWE's LiveJasmin.com attracted 10,000 paying followers. That's a lot of cash, even in an industry used to quick fortune.
It's one reason a site like Live Jasmin can now operate in the same cultural space once reserved for luxury brands like Chandon or Bentley: Flo Rida name checked the site in his recent single, "Hey Jasmin."
Hey girl I see you online, show me your sign You're a wild one that's what I like You can be screaming, and I maybe beat it But we still gonna be on like Jasmin dotcom
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