Editor’s Note: This was originally a response to a post in Stripperweb regarding “Streamate doesn’t buy traffic.
OK ladies (and gentlebbs), we need to get away from this narrative that Streamate (or any box site) stopped “advertising and buying traffic”. That’s not how it works, nor has it ever worked. Streamate did some experiments with TV ads, but this is a very rare and minor part of their budget. The bulk of their traffic comes from armies of whitelabel affiliates, ad banner affiliates, and cammodels pushing their affiliate links – through either their .cammodels program, moneytree program, or cambuilder.com program. In this, they pay continuously 30-40% of the customer spending to the advertisers…a nearly equal share to what the models get. If nobody is making money, Streamate isn’t paying you or them or getting any money for themselves. Traffic is not a magic button you push, authorize the Paypal transaction, and then out pops 50,000 paying customers at your doorstep…it doesn’t work like that at all.
How customer spending works in real life
The jobs go like this, as a percent of customer spending:
+/-30% pay – Streamate (or any big box site), responsible for billing, fraud detection, accounting, servers, administrative overhead, setting up new deals and partnerships, technology development, hosting, resolving disputes, paying the bills
+/-30% pay – Affiliates, responsible for directing traffic from free porn sites (mostly) or any amount of other creative places to Streamate.
+/-30% pay – Models, responsible for making visitors want to part with their credit card details, enticing them into shows, keeping them as satisfied clients and coming back for more
~10% pay – divided between studios/recruiters, model bonus programs, affiliate bonus programs, and credit card company overhead.
Various programs they run will nudge these percents a bit up or down, but this is the general idea. Carefully notice how this is a percentage of customer spending. If any one of these people fail in doing their job and that visitor never parts with their money, nobody gets paid. Streamate didn’t pay for bad traffic, the only traffic they pay for is “good traffic”. Likewise if you got a spending client, that was “good traffic” by definition. If affiliates aren’t pushing Streamate any more, then that means they lost their incentive – either Streamate isn’t providing the proper platform, setting their % high enough, or models are hijacking the clients as they come in. If you get enough of that, then the better affiliates find other things to do with their time.
The constructive thing to think about is how do you break that cycle. Saying Streamate needs to pay more for traffic means their affiliates need a bigger cut…and that comes out of someone else’s pie piece. If it comes out of yours as a model, the models would scream. If it comes out of Streamate’s 30%, more administrative and technical nightmares are sure to follow. Would models give up 5% more of their cut to hand it to the affiliates they love so much?
Like it or not, this is at least Streamate’s model of income for all concerned…and it keeps the highest average hourly pay for models of any cam site. It also keeps them from putting silly Fuckbook ads spammed all over your camming pages to make up for lost income.
And another thing…
The other main thing nobody is talking about really is the model count. From what we can estimate, it has effectively doubled in the last year. That’s twice as many fish for not that much more fish food. Streamate, being a single entity, is probably doing just as well as ever, but they are needing to deal with double the administrative overhead. Competent affiliates are also a rare commodity, so they’re actually doing well if they stick it out.
But how does it effect you?
Models though, this is where the real income hit comes in.
If you cut model income in half, nobody’s happy. An obvious response from Streamate in dealing with it though is by putting a much higher bar to the tech quality and requirements for the models…putting the onus on them.
Using sub-par tech like trying to stream on wifi or camming on your hipster Mac potato? Streamate will make your life miserable.
Is your hustle not competitive and you’re sitting there like dear-in-headlights? That’s no longer a valid option for making money…they have too many models willing to sing, dance, and stand on their heads (wiggling their ears also) with 50 free videos.
The result is that instead of 100% miserable, now its 30% doing as well or better than ever, 20% wanting to do as well, and 50% miserable and trying to figure out what happened. Note carefully I didn’t say anything about bargain prices. Good whales, by and large, are not bargain hunters. Lowering prices in an effort to be competitive simply hurts everyone’s income, starting with yours. The affiliates aren’t too impressed either.
We see this play out over and over again. Brand new models with high energy that don’t know anything but competitive hustle are banking. Experienced models with good work ethic and who keep up with their hustle and tech are banking. New models thinking this is easy money or returning models thinking they can just do what they did 3-5 years ago and everything will be fine find out quickly how disappointing camming can be. At one point, you could cam forever and not worry about investing in the best internet or upgrading your camming gear. This is no longer the case.
That being said, Streamate is going through some very tough growing pains for the last few months trying to adapt to the tech curve of the 2000-teens. Mobile is the buzzword and they’ve been sold on the idea…and there isn’t much going back. The model count has also strained their servers to the breaking point and this becomes patently obvious as the active online model count creeps into the 1500+ range in a given day. Streamate’s random good and bad traffic and tech days do nothing to help the situation, but if you adapt a long-term, work hell-or-high water approach, you still make a good, regular, steady income.
Cyclical Traffic
What to do for Streamate success?
Best advice from watching hundreds of models climb to success:
- Keep a regular schedule. Treat camming like a real job that you regularly work. It doesn’t have to be a lot of hours (15 hours/week is recommended)
- Do NOT worry about the money. Worry about your hustle first. Easy to say, hard to do, but this is key. Looking continuously beaten as your shift goes on does nothing to help you compete.
- To go along with that, DO stay upbeat and chatty. Clients want dominant (or submissive), flirty, sexy, and worry-free. They’re paying good money for a professional to entrust with their immediate needs. You want to be just interesting enough that the visitor doesn’t bounce away to another room (or off the site), but you are also reserving the promise of a good show.
- Do NOT lower your prices. Spenders will spend and will pay anything remotely reasonable. Bargain hunters will look for bargains and you’ll never be cheap enough. The only thing lowering your prices will do is lower your income.
- Always remember that it is your job to convert that visitor into a paying client. This is your responsibility alone. The site gave you the tools to work with, the affiliate dropped the visitor on your lap, now its your turn to close the deal. ABC…always be closing.
- Keep your tech up to date. The standard is an i5-i7 with at least a Logitech C920 and a good solid wired ethernet connection to a plan with at least 5mb upload. If you have less than this or are using a strange setup (like a Mac or wifi), do not expect anyone to adapt to you or your special needs. Streamate is just behind a few other sites in tech requirements, more will follow shortly. Put some love into your camming setup and it will love you back.
