CAM4 remains a leading live-streaming adult show platform in what has quickly become a very competitive field.
Although CAM4 launched as a brand in 2007, the company behind it has been involved in the adult entertainment industry for more than 20 years.
CAM4 is a community of real people, forming real relationships we love performers and the experiences they create. -Derek Devlin, CAM4
A string of innovations within the company since the earliest days of streaming sex online have helped the company continue to prosper and now as the company evolves its way into new areas of erotica XBIZ sat down to see what everyone can expect in the coming months and years from CAM4.
To get a good grasp on the importance of a site like CAM4, it’s always important to start with some stats and demographic data. CAM4 services more than 24 million customers, speaking 42 different languages from 28,000 cities around the globe by streaming video content from over 30,000 live performers every day. That’s five full years in video length pumping out to the world from CAM4 performers every single day, 365 days each year.
Still, when you speak to the people behind the brand, they focus much more on a sense of community and relationship building than any of the raw data. Getting beyond the antiseptic facts and establishing a more visceral connection with the audience is what really makes all the difference.
“CAM4 is a community of real people, forming real relationships,” said Derek Devlin, head of PR for CAM4. “We love performers and the experiences they create. It’s our users and community that make CAM4 such a great place to hang out — without them we wouldn’t exist. We continue to flourish thanks to our committed performers and their loyal fans.
“We help them be discovered, find their audience and build their business. We work to provide the best webcam platform in the industry by equipping performers with the tools they need to give the most immersive experience possible,” he said. “Our desire to improve and evolve fosters a culture of innovation within our organization — we are never happy to be standing still. We are proudly continuing to push the boundary on what is achievable in the adult market. CAM4VR is testament to that.”
Innovation has always been a key component of the CAM4 pedigree. From its early days as the first company to stream live sex online, to later industry shifts when they were one of the first platforms to pioneer a “model tipping” business model to go along with the pay per minute monetization methods of the past. Now that trajectory toward what’s newest and best continues as CAM4 begins partnering with VRTube.
“We have been able to combine industry leading VR tech and always on 24/7 content,” Devlin said. “Our VR cam experience is in our opinion the leading VR cam product in the market today. We have in this past year also launched our C4 chat application that allows our users to stay in contact 24/7 through their Android devices. Users love it because it makes the viewer/performer relationship much more intimate.
We also launched our mobile broadcasting app allowing performers to broadcast on the move, from any location they choose, which has made for many interesting and completely spontaneous shows.”
The road to success is always paved with solutions to overcoming obstacles and pitfalls encountered along the way. For CAM4 those past challenges have now become an impressive list of accomplishments. In the early days of live streaming sex, the challenge was a technical one, because keeping up with the demand required solving many throughput limitations that hadn’t been sorted out by anyone else already.
At one point, early in the site’s history, CAM4 was consuming more bandwidth than the entire country of China. Later as free content became an important market-driving force, CAM4 became one of the first cam sites to adopt a completely free to watch, chat and broadcast business model.
At the time, the decision was treated with skepticism by outsiders, but since then the site has proven that the choice made the product much more accessible and was a key reason why the company was able to gain popularity quickly.
Still to this day, viewers are able to come online and interact with the site before signing up. The platform works so well, because viewers form relationships and seek increased engagement pretty quickly, which provides plenty of incentive for each to sign up when they decide it’s time to get the enhanced features and the value of a CAM4 Gold Membership becomes self-evident.
Often we find that successful companies are optimistic ones, and while some might debate whether optimism breeds success, or success breeds optimism, the outlook among CAM4 executives, models and members is very optimistic about the future.
“We are very optimistic about the future of the cam industry,” Devlin said. “The convergence of VR, teledildonics and live cams makes this a really exciting time for the industry. Never before has a viewer been able to get so close to the performer.
“We are looking at the dawn of a fully immersive and interactive experience that although virtual, is as close to a real world experience as you can get,” Devlin said. “Having virtual sex and being directly pleasured by a cam performer whilst being fully present in his or her bedroom is now possible with the pending integrations between teledildonic devices and live cams we look forward to being at the front of this technological innovation, continuing the push the envelope on what’s possible to bring performer and viewer closer together.”
Another reason the outlook for the cam industry and CAM4 specifically is so strong comes from the fact that new models are starting their camming careers at an amazing pace.
CAM4 takes a performer-first approach that allows the company to help thousands of new performers make the transition from sexy amateurs to commercially viable professional models.
“If you’re new to the industry it can be daunting to know where to start. We want to make the transition from girl/guy next door to cam performer as seamless as possible,” Devlin said. “It’s why we have dedicated performer coaches, providing weekly coaching sessions in seven different languages. We have also invested a lot of time into our training materials and anyone who wants to learn more about camming can do so at cam4.com/training.”
“We are committed to making CAM4 the most performer friendly platform in the industry,” he said. “One example of our commitment to this is in our daily payments, since October 2010 we have been quietly processing daily payments for all countries. Our payment setup is designed to be as performer friendly as possible. We don’t charge processing fees and always try to remove as many barriers as possible while giving performers every chance of achieving success with CAM4.”
Beyond the dollars and cents, CAM4 is also proud to be helping to usher in an era of diversity and cross-cultural understanding. “CAM4 champions diversity, for us it really is a core values of what we stand for as a company,” Devlin said. “From day one, the site has been open to anyone. Regardless of sexual orientation, ethnicity, nationality, creed or gender, you are welcome to express yourself at CAM4. That may be why CAM4 is also one of the biggest gay sites on the Internet, a fact we never take for granted, and something we are fiercely proud of.”
So, what’s next from this company that always seems to be a step ahead? Industry insiders are already watching the release of the CAM4VR with anticipation.
“With the emergence of VR technology in the mainstream market, CAM4 offers an opportunity for viewers to experience cam shows that surpasses any 2D analog live streaming option,” said Ela Darling, head of VR for CAM4.
“VRTube.xxx specializes in 360-degree experiences for audiences to digitally explore real world environments in real time so that each audience member audience can feel like they are in the same room as the performer,” Darling said. “It’s a new way of experiencing cam shows, both for the performer and the viewer with the immersive capabilities of these new technologies allowing CAM4 to bring an amazing user experience to a mass audience on a first of its kind platform.”
