Cam girls are choosing sex streaming as a long-term career path

The most infamous cammer in the world right now is also the one most dedicated to the industry’s longevity.

Kendra Sunderland, a.k.a. “Library Girl” (below), is the 19-year-old Oregonian arrested for masturbating while others studied next to her at Oregon State University. She already knows how she would like her entire career to end.

“I plan on camming until I die,” she says. “Then my funeral is going to be at a cam show.”

Seriously.

See also: Why you should never tell your partner to stop masturbating

Sunderland, like thousands of other fresh-faced masturbators in this burgeoning industry, makes hundreds of dollars almost every day by stripping and pleasuring herself in front of a computer webcam while thousands of strangers watch online and tip her in order to encourage certain lascivious acts. Hosting sites split the tip money, which can range from cents to thousands of dollars.

Camming is quickly becoming a a lucrative and relatively stable job option in modern pornography and voyerism.

The entire cam girl industry is currently valued at more than $1 billion, says Sean Phillips, vice president of marketing for sexyjobs.com, which caters to more than 80,000 adult job seekers daily. Whereas five years ago, cam girl jobs represented about 5% of the ads on its site, today he says they represent 50% of the nearly 2,500 daily job offers advertised online.

The industry is more profitable than porn.

Another thing that differentiates camming from mainstream adult entertainment: People aren’t only interested in watching young women.

“Historically, the adult video industry tended to concentrate on the 18-29 age bracket, but the more intimate nature of camming supports a much wider range of ages, as well as fetishes and other interests,” he says. “A webcam performer only needs to appeal a very small segment of the consumer market and it is still possible to be very successful within that market.”

Currently, he says, there are 33 applicants on his site who are 60 or older and seeking webcam jobs, including one 88-year-old who wants to be employed in porn along with her 27-year-old lover.

There’s even a convention for performers, CamCon, in Miami, to bring eager cammers of all ages together to exchange tips and tricks. It ends Sunday, June 7.

“The cam industry is growing because more and more people are finding out anyone can do it. You can do it at whatever comfort level you want, and you will still build fans,” says Stacey Havoc, a representative of CamCon. “It doesn’t matter what you look like or how old you are. There is someone for everyone.”

In this year’s documentary Cam Girlz, 40 women of varying ages, ethnicities and sexual orientations cannot find enough good things to say about the profession’s ability to empower, employ and, obviously, entertain.

The documentary’s oldest star, Khyla, is in her sixties. She began camming after the love of her life died unexpectedly, leaving her alone and financially hurting.

“I was feeling a loss, and it really turned my life around,” she says in the movie. “There’s a unique little category of guys that are looking for older women. Not only guys my age or older than me but also really young guys, and they’re really into it.”

The incredibly popular camming site LiveJasmin.com was launched in 2001, and the number of active models in the last month runs the gamut, age-wise. There are about 3,000 models who are 18-20 years old; about 13,000 models who are 21-29 years old; and about 5,000 models 30 and up.

The oldest performer? She’s 79.

Sean Dunne, director of Cam Girlz, says that one of the reasons performers consider it a stable career path today is because it’s such a profound sea change in the way adult entertainment is delivered.

“Camming represents a paradigm shift in adult entertainment, away from a system that upheld an industry and towards a more sustainable model that focuses on the performer,” he says. “It’s the democratization of pornography.”

“As camming becomes more transparent and publicly accepted, we think more people will choose it as a long-term activity, even if only on a part-time basis,” says LiveJasmin’s head of PR Melanie Delannoy. “Since technology has greatly advanced, people spend more time online, so why not earn money while having fun at the same time? The protection of one’s privacy is also developing, which is a plus for those who don’t want to go public.”

And like you would expect, profit motive is in fact what is making the industry so desirable to not just college seniors — but actual seniors as well.

“Models have the liberty to come online whenever they wish,” Delannoy says. “Some of them who are online regularly may earn well over $50,000 within a two-week period.”

Ross A. Love, owner of Best Kept Studio Agency, which has more than 2,000 models on more than 30 different cam sites, won’t reveal what his models are making, but he says on myfreecams.com the top 250 are making on average more than $100,000 a year.

“These models are the exception,” he cautions. “Eighty percent of our models make on average $300 [every 15 days].”

However, as long as a cam girl markets herself heavily on social media, Love sees potential for maintaining revenue for a long time.

Of course, the closest thing to “cam girl veteran” in the still-emerging industry might be someone as young as 26-year-old Ophelia Marcus, a.k.a. “LittleRedBunny,” who has been in the business for six years.

“I play with my flexibility while I have 20 conversations at the same time,” says the New Yorker, who incorporates ballet and yoga into her old-fashioned tease show. “My traffic can go up to 4,000 people at the same time.”

Like many in the industry, no one in her real life knows what she does for a living. “I am probably one of the first ones that actually started to do it as a full-time job. I never thought I would last six years. I think you can still be camming at any age.”

Several of her regulars tell her they have stopped watching TV and prefer to watch her instead. They have private jokes, love her bubbly personality and consider her a real friend. Still, she says her actual intimate interactions IRL are private and off-limits.

“Online nobody can touch, smell and taste me. So to me, there’s still something sacred,” she says. “I don’t talk about what I do with anybody. I live kind of in a bubble.”

She says she has never refused a customer, works eight to 12 hours a day, seven days a week, with her longest day clocking in at 19 hours, and clients pay her $3.99 to $4.99 a minute.

“Every night is a surprise,” she says. “I get my pleasure from [a client’s] requests, and by the pleasure I get, it’s feeding his pleasure, and it’s feeding my pleasure. So it keeps things exciting and unpredictable, growing over time.”

Aspiring cam girl lifer Sunderland (Library Girl) is different than many in the industry because she’s famous. Many in the mainstream know of her career — except for her eight-year-old brother.

Even before her scandal at the university library in Oregon, her parents found out her secret when she created a Twitter account for camming, entered in her real phone number and then an auto-message was sent to people in her contact list. One of those friends was close to her parents.

So far, outside of getting kicked out of school, she sees nothing but up-sides. Office space costs are minimal, and she turned her old roommate’s room into her cam show, complete with a blowup mattress, pictures of her in magazines on the wall, toys on display, bins filled with costumes and lingerie, and a laundry basket to prop up her computer.

Camming takes up about four to five hours a day, and she turns down requests frequently. “I have turned down a couple customers before because I didn’t want to do what they wanted me to do, like lick my dirty shoe or fart.”

She’s also practical about what she physically needs to do (or pretend to do) in order to get the job done.

“I try not to fake it but after my fourth or fifth private show it gets a lot harder to orgasm,” she reveals.

As for job-related stress, the only example she gives is when she tried to cam from her hotel room and the Wi-Fi sucked. “I was in the middle of a show and that was stressful,” she says.

Like prostitution or stripping (neither of which she does), Sunderland actually does consider camming to be sex work because, she says, “masturbation can be considered a form of sex.”

When she watched the Cam Girlz documentary, she says she felt inspired by the older cammer, Khyla, who is in her sixties.

“I hate when people say, ‘Oh you can’t do this for the rest of your life,’” she says. “With other jobs, you don’t know if you’re going to get fired or not. And I’m not going to regret this when I’m older. It’s a part of who I am, and I really have found my dream job.”

She hopes her growing legion of fans will actually grow old alongside her. Considering many of her customers express more interest in the girlfriend experience than the sexual one, she might just pull it off.

At the very least, the Internet is on her side.

“In this technological age, human beings are starving for authentic connections, and that is the great paradox about camming,” observes Phillips of sexyjobs.com. “Even though it is made possible by technology, it also solves the loneliness that has been created by it.”

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