While there are ways you can maximise your setup and potential for the best chance of standing out amongst the crowd (which I’ll get into a little bit later), even the most accomplished of cammers have their off days, so don’t be too hard on yourself.
There are such a vast number of different web sites out there where you can set up a profile to cam and start earning cash from the get-go. They all have their own pro’s and con’s, and depending on your personality, you’ll likely find yourself drawn to one or two above all others.
Tipping based sites, like CAM4 and Chaturbate are essentially where you have your own chat room, and anyone (paying or non-paying) can drop by to watch and interact with you. The way you generally make money on these sites is by gaining tokens, which you can later redeem for cash.
How you go about gaining tokens is entirely up for you. On Chaturbate a lot of the performers choose to do ‘countdowns’ – where they’ll put on a pre-determined show of some kind, (usually a cum show) for their viewers once they reach the end of it…
Cam4 is similar in that you can set a ‘Goal’ for yourself – but it’s not a necessity. Generally when I’m performing on Cam4 I’ll charge 25 to 50 tokens – depending on how many viewers are online, per request.
There’s also the option of ‘Going Private’ on Cam4, where a user with tokens can essentially ‘have you to themselves’ for a minute based token rate. I generally don’t do too many private’s these days, as I prefer the interaction of an audience on a larger scale, but they’re great for boosting your earnings, and if at any time you feel uncomfortable, or can’t deliver whatever the tipper is asking you to do, you can choose to shut down the session and return to the main chat room.
Tipping based sites aren’t for everyone and there are other alternatives. Streamate, for example, is a site where you earn the majority of your money from people taking you to Exclusive/Private chat (you can set your own rates as to how much you want to charge per minute), and another camming site, LiveJasmin, works in a similar manner.
The problem I personally find with these sites is that quite often I find myself sitting around waiting for someone to take me to private – and whilst sometimes you can log on and be in the midst of a 30 minute private show within seconds, other times an hour can go by where not a single user will choose to engage with you. I find it quite cold and soul-destroying myself, but for some people they get a great flow of customers and probably wouldn’t ever even consider camming anywhere else.
Thirdly, there’s what’s known as ‘independent’, or ‘indie’ camming – essentially putting on shows for clients over video chat programs like Skype. Though you wont get the money right away, it’s best to agree with your client beforehand to do this for a pre-determined rate, paid in tokens via your chosen camming platform (for me, CAM4) – Paypal is a bit of a grey area when it comes to exchanging money for what’s considered ‘adult services’ – so whilst you might get away with it once or twice, there’s no guarantee you won’t run into problems if you frequently accept payment this way.
I’ve ran into issues with clients who have paid this way before. They filed a dispute against me, despite going through with the show as agreed, and essentially left me with no other option but to refund them – or risk losing my account by admitting I’d been using it to put on adult shows.
Other cammers choose to accept payment in the form of Amazon Gift Cards or clients buying them an item of relevant cost from their Wish List. These are generally safer options.
FOUR – The birth of JMatt93
After doing my research I’d decided to try out camming for cash for myself. I thought to myself ‘why not? I have nothing to lose by giving it a go!’
I didn’t put too much thought in to coming up with a stage name so opted for signing up under the username Jmatt93 – with the J representing my first name Joseph (which I wasn’t willing to divulge, at least initially), and Matt the Matthew in my middle name; 93 because that was of course the year I was born. Pretty simple and straightforward I know, but I didn’t want anything too flash, cocky or self assured. SEXIBRITLAD1 and HOTHORNYYOUNGSLUTBOY, for example, were completely out of the question!
I waited till my parents had gone to bed one Sunday evening and decided this was the night I was going to make my Cam4 debut! I remember at the time I was using a white Toshiba laptop (which was pretty worn out, having owned it for several years and not really maintained it very well), and broadcasted from the in-built webcam, in the spacious downstairs living room of my family home.
I’d been watching in the days prior some of the more established performers as a bit of market research, and saw that generally they were earning tokens by offering things like ‘25 tokens for dick/ass flash’ or ‘naked at 100 tokens’.
But I wasn’t an established performer – I was a nobody by comparison, and it soon became apparent (after about an hour of sitting around fidgeting, and manoeuvring myself into all sorts of positions to try and look as confident, alluring and sexy as I could), that people just weren’t willing to pay those prices for amateur like myself.
At a loss as to what to set my rates to, I adjusted my tagline to a more general ‘Please tip for requests’ – figuring anything was better than nothing by this point. But the traffic in my room was so slow, averaging about 7 viewers at a time, and those that did interact with me were generally token-less freeloaders, who all seemed to want something for nothing.
Still, like the determined little shit I was, still am, and will probably always be, I stuck it out.
My total earnings for that first night of camming on February 22nd 2015 were? Drum roll please…
$1.50!
The following evening was marginally better as I somehow managed to rake in a further $2.50, but I if I was truly going to make this work as a source of income, I knew I had to up my game massively.
I figured consistency was key. Even if I was earning fuck all to begin with, I still wanted to be online as much as possible, so that my face was out there for anyone and everyone browsing the site to see. I experimented with camming at different times of the day and night, and made sure to pay attention to the ‘amount of viewers online’ – as listed on the left hand side of the Cam4 homepage, so I could figure out when I had the best chance of drawing more traffic into my room.
Within a week or two I was averaging a solid $15 a night and started to notice the same users would frequent my room. I always tried my best to be talkative and interact with all of my viewers, regardless of whether they tipped or not. A lot of the guys, I figured, were lonely, and enjoyed the fact that I was willing to communicate with them. And on reflection I suppose I was lonely too. Maybe that’s why I tried so hard to make camming work for me – because more than I needed the money, I needed the company. That was perhaps the true driving force behind it all.
A few weeks into camming, I got a message from a guy who’d been stopping by my room every other day or so, asking if I’d be willing to put on a private Skype show for him, one-on-one.