Live sex shows heat up cyberspace
Up, close & personal: Cam models like Lacey earn money through ‘tips’ , electronic tokens viewers give that allow them to instruct the models through typed messages.
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A 25-year-old woman whose fans know her as Lacey dipped an index finger into a jar. She scooped up a dollop of foundation makeup andspread it on her cheeks. "One of the other models showed me this," she said. "It's for highdef cameras. " She wore a low-cut purple dress and her hair was pulled into a loose bun. "I'm late. I still have to set up the lights." She hustled to the corner of the room to retrieve two light stands. On the wall next to the lights hung some of Lacey's props, including two wooden paddles she uses to spank herself.
Most of her other sex toys were out of sight organized in bins. It was 10 am at Lacey's home office in New Mexico. She was about to start work.
Lacey is a cam model. She performs one-woman sex shows, often from her house, though she has performed in a car, on a hiking trail, and once at an airport. The action is captured by a camera clipped to the top of her laptop, and available to anyone who visits a website called MyFreeCams.
The cam business, a kind of digital-era peep show, has been around for a few years, but as the technology has become better and cheaper, the concept of camming is proving well more than passing: it has created a money-making opportunity in a pornography business eroded by the distribution of free sexual content on the internet. Unlike prerecorded pornography, cam shows, which happen in real time, are hard to pirate. The traffic to the most popular camming internet sites is substantial, with a handful of the top sites getting 30 million visitors a month, according to Compete.
com, which measures internet traffic. At any given time, hundreds of models are online, some being watched by 1,000 or more people, others giving private shows. The money generated by cam sites is hundreds of millions of dollars at least, and very likely a billion or more, according to industry analysts.
The money generally comes not from subscriptions or pay-per-view, but rather from credits or "tips," electronic tokens viewers give that allow them to interact with the models — instructing them through typed messages to use a certain sex toy or use it in a specific way. The websites provide the platform and then collect and distribute the tips to the models.
But camming has its abuses, and some cam models discover that despite the sense of security the internet provides, they still can be threatened with disclosure to friends and family, and pressured to do acts they didn't bargain for.
Most of her other sex toys were out of sight organized in bins. It was 10 am at Lacey's home office in New Mexico. She was about to start work.
Lacey is a cam model. She performs one-woman sex shows, often from her house, though she has performed in a car, on a hiking trail, and once at an airport. The action is captured by a camera clipped to the top of her laptop, and available to anyone who visits a website called MyFreeCams.
The cam business, a kind of digital-era peep show, has been around for a few years, but as the technology has become better and cheaper, the concept of camming is proving well more than passing: it has created a money-making opportunity in a pornography business eroded by the distribution of free sexual content on the internet. Unlike prerecorded pornography, cam shows, which happen in real time, are hard to pirate. The traffic to the most popular camming internet sites is substantial, with a handful of the top sites getting 30 million visitors a month, according to Compete.
com, which measures internet traffic. At any given time, hundreds of models are online, some being watched by 1,000 or more people, others giving private shows. The money generated by cam sites is hundreds of millions of dollars at least, and very likely a billion or more, according to industry analysts.
The money generally comes not from subscriptions or pay-per-view, but rather from credits or "tips," electronic tokens viewers give that allow them to interact with the models — instructing them through typed messages to use a certain sex toy or use it in a specific way. The websites provide the platform and then collect and distribute the tips to the models.
But camming has its abuses, and some cam models discover that despite the sense of security the internet provides, they still can be threatened with disclosure to friends and family, and pressured to do acts they didn't bargain for.
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