How to start a cam site?
5 step guide to building your first adult business.
Adult industry for decades was leading a path of being the fastest growing market globally. Even that erotic/porn was always among civilizations it still grows 10% to 15% annually and in 2018 the market probably would hit more than $150B valuation. That’s big money making market. No wonder so many people are at least thinking about jumping on the cart.
Beside that cam site business itself is constantly increasing its market share because loneliness is a major issue throughout the industrialised world. Along with the superiority of live content we are witnessing an interesting upward trend of this market part. We want to be “here and now” whatever it’s news, events or entertainment.
I personally took advantage of this opportunity and created Spotlive which is sex live cams platform, open to all kinds of performers with vision to make some changes towards building healthy adult community. But let’s leave that for another time.
I truly believe if we want to make a big impact on something we’ll need more than one person to push things forward. That’s why I’ve decided to create this guide to help some people get into the industry with some insights and advice on how to start your first adult business. Hope it would be the ignition for many of you.
Before you’ll start taking real action you should ask yourself couple of questions that would lead you to conclusions and gives you guides. The sincerity of the answers to those questions are important because later it will define your path of building your own cam site (or not).
Let’s start with:
1. Why I want to start this?
There are limitless reasons why you want to start your own cam site or business in general. It could be willingness to make additional money, pursuing your passion, challenging yourself or making a positive impact on the backwarded industry - like me. Whatever it is, it should matter to you.
Why it’s important? Different reasons leads us to different paths. Let’s say, you want to build yourself passive income. Building a healthy, traditional business from a ground up probably isn’t the best case for you. But if you choose to make a bigger change and take solid bite of that adult industry cake you should consider this option.
2. What type of cam site is right for me?
Yes, there are several types of cam sites. We do have this comfort in the adult industry where we can choose the type of the business that we want to start regardless of our ambitions. I’ll point out the most important of them (from the easiest to hardest):
- Whitelabel — is a kind of website where you are building your own brand (logo and design) under the major company that provides affiliation program you’re partnering with. In most cases, in exchange for majority of commission, they provide you servers, cam site software and content.
Advantages: Simple, fast and very low cost solution.
Disadvantages: Low commissions, a dozen of regulations limiting your growth, you are not the owner of database (users nor performers). - Cam Site Website Software — there are several companies that can provide you a software that would give you a basic structure of a cam site for a one time payment or in a SaaS model (monthly fee). They give you various options to set up your site that works with your needs. Sometimes they also provide server services which helps a lot.
Advantages: Easy, average costs.
Disadvantages: Poor designs, limits of features, need of content. - Your Own Software (Startup) — the most time and money consuming solution but definitely worth trying if you’re planning to start business seriously. It gives you limitless possibilities of doing things your own way.
Advantages: No limits.
Disadvantages: Requires major investment, time-consuming, high risk.
3. How I can collect money?
You don’t have to be an expert to at least heard that adult and gambling industries are labeled as a “high risk business” in terms of finance across all payment services (from corporate banking to payment systems). It means that sometimes it will be hard to find the perfect solution for your cam site particularly when we are talking about mainstream companies like PayPal or Stripe.
There are couple of brands that were build especially for adult business. Most of them have a lot of in common if we talk about types of credit/debit card or types of online payments but differences can be in supported countries or/and currencies. Just take a deeper look and choose the one which is the best fit for you. I’ve listed couple of companies worth checking below:
4. How I can get first content?
Getting content it’s not only the hardest but the most important part of the whole process. It would define the attractiveness of the website and the speed of your growth. This problem don’t exist if you’ve chosen to start as a whitelabel site because your business partner would provide you that. Things starts complicating when you’re deciding to have an independent business.
The problem seems to be a similar to this which Uber has on the first months of their journey. They couldn’t really take off because without drivers they couldn’t get customers and without customers they couldn’t get drivers. You’re probably wondering what they have done to achieve their goals. They started going from cab spots to cab spots from taxi driver to taxi driver, and they were sales pitching them with working proposals. Of course with big bonuses for start. How to find your first “taxi drivers”? There are couple of places were a lot of performers gather to exchange their experiences, where you can advertise:
Although, I think this solution is the most effective and will bring you the most benefits, I can understand that it can consume a lot of time and money (I mean a lot). In many situations, especially on the beginnings, you just can’t afford that sacrifice. And here comes another solution which would provide you with a multiple content 24/7. In most cases it’s as easy as implementing an API to your website. Here are the companies worth checking out:
5. How I can get first users?
Personally my favourite part. I highly advice you to turn the industry’s most vulnerable banner ads (the main reason why the industry looks so bad) in its own power to drive its own growth. There are few adult ad networks that provides ad spaces on the biggest sites like: Chaturbate, Cam4, PornHub, RedTube, YouPorn and much much more. Just upload your banner ads, chose your audience and watch the results. It works exactly the same as Google AdWords… except it’s for porn. Here are some online advertising platform:
Those 5 step should be enough to help you with launching your first cam site and making first bucks. The rest is the future!
If you got questions or want to get more information feel free to hit me up in a comment below. I’ll do my best to help you out!
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Jacob Michalak
(CEO & Co-founder, Spotlive)
Professional graphic designer, truly passionate about it. In, 2014 he took up probably the biggest challenge in his life — he created Spotlive, a reinvented sex chat. When it comes to design — he’s a perfectionist, in business — he always keeps an open mind. Stickler, pain in the ass to IT developers.