The interesting thing about free cam girls is that they are not a recent phenomenon. Webcam entertainment has been going on ever since the birth of the Internet, believe it or not. The problem was early on, webcams were very expensive. Also, there wasn’t a standard protocol, so there are all sorts of technical issues and software glitches. Webcams really only came into their own a couple of years after the Internet became commercially popular in 1996.
The problem at that time was the expense. You have to understand that back in those days, it didn’t take much to become a millionaire off online pornography and online adult entertainment. In fact, you can just show banners on your website and when people click on a banner without buying anything, you can easily make twenty-five cents. If you add these all up, it’s easy to understand why there were so many instant millionaires in the early days of the Internet.
The same holds true for webcam entertainment since webcams were so new and girls were so few and far between, the pay rate for webcam models was just astronomical. We’re talking about $10 a minute and below. It was crazy. It’s not unusual for a webcam performer to make more money in a week than she does in a month. It’s no surprise that a lot of former strippers quit their jobs and took on a webcam entertainment full time.
Well, just like with any good thing, everything has to come to an end. With the dot-com bust in 2001, a lot of these air was let out of online adult entertainment. It seems that there was a flood of webcam performers looking to do shows for very little money. This is still the case with the webcam landscape. Don’t let anybody convince you otherwise, it really is a race to the bottom.
One key driver is the fact that there are a lot of webcam girls operating in Eastern Europe, and this drives down the pricing for Caucasian performers. There are also a lot of women performing on webcams in places like Thailand and the Philippines which drives down the pricing for Asian women. For Latin American performers, the price is quite low because there are a lot of performers in South and Central America.
This is the evolution of webcam girls. The next big trend really is to differentiate yourself from generic free cam performers and focus on developing a solid brand. As the market shifts to a free model, there’s a tremendous amount of pressure on performers to really differentiate themselves from the competition.
I don’t think this is necessarily bad because the cream will rise to the top. If you develop a reputation for putting on a really good show, you will make good money. That’s the bottom line. I think that the whole race to the bottom, and the whole movement towards the free cam model has really pushed performers to do their very best.
