I dumped a hundred into cam girl websites because I was curious and the damn clubs are closed!
Anyhow tl:dr: it was lame as fuck. I can 100% see why any stripper would convert to cams 100% if they had the option. It can be much easier work than stripping. The competition is insane though and some girls sit there for hours making like $1/hr.
It varies depending on which site you go to, but you pay around $0.10 per token +/- package discounts. If you spend these on girls they get $0.05 per token and the house keeps the rest. Sounds reasonable in theory but in reality this is approaching strip-club prices. Private shows go from like 8 ($0.80)-90 ($9.00) tokens per minute plus they want tips on top of that. You can easily burn thru $100 faster than in the club for far less return. Some of these women are fine as fuck, but I just don't get anything out of watching them on cams.
They got a couple cool gimmicks like VR cams and interactive toys, but I'm sticking to pornhub and saving for when our country is great again.
Yeah I was involved with a stripper years ago that went from stripper to cam girl. She was a single mom with 2 teenage kids so it enabled her to be at home all the time. She made 60k her first year and jumped to over 100k her 2nd year, but she was online “working” 8-10 hours a day at least 6 days a week. She would wait around all night for half a dozen of big tippers to come online which made up 3/4 of her earnings. She also worked in the mornings, said her secret to getting random guys in her room tipping was being online from 6am to the early afternoon because not many other girls were working during that time, and her kids were at school.
Like you said it’s competitive and when she became that popular it was like she was wearing a target on her back and other cam girls would come into her chat room and steal her customers. By her 3rd year she was making less than 50k but to this day she still cams and her 1st year cramming happened in 2010. I didn’t even know what canning was back then...