What makes a camgirl successful? Survey results

Option A: Having natural hair color
Option B: Being really hot
Option C: Doing lots of drugs
Option D: Doing a fuckton of games
Option E: All of the above

hint: the answer is E

My Data Has Limits, Beware!

I got 311 responses from people who identified as cam performers. I threw out all male cammers, people who hadn’t cammed in the last 6 months, people who had wildly inconsistent answers, and people who skipped a lot of questions.

This left me with a sample size of 278.

If there weren’t a lot of answers in a category, sometimes I grouped them together. For example, when asked to rate their own attractiveness, only a handful gave answers spread around the range of 1-5. I combined all of them to function as 5. So, for example, “15% of girls are 5 or under, 22% are 6, 18% are 7, etc.” I don’t know if this is the right way to handle data, so if I made an error here, let me know!

I tried to ensure all categories had at least 25 responses, but most have over 30.

All spectrum answers were out of 7 (e.g., on a scale from 1 (low) and 7 (high), rate your body weight)

I think the error margin for my answers is 5-7%, based off of some light googling, but the margin is probably much higher for correlations. Try to squint when you look at the graphs.

I used DataHero, a correlation finder for dummies complete idiots.

Also please remember my sample size is camgirls who are involved in networking! I used twitter and forums to spread the survey, so I missed camgirls who are disconnected from the community, and their numbers might be very different.

Onto the juice:

When I asked about income, I asked for ranges, and plugged in the numbers as the bottom of that range. For example: an income of $1-10 I registered as ‘1.’ The number you see is the average sum of the bottom of all the ranges. The highest category is $200+/hr.

So, out of camgirls who struggle with anxiety/depression frequently, the bottom range of their earnings is $45/hr. Girls who don’t struggle make a bottom range of $62/hr. I don’t actually know if this is the right way to categorize the data, but at least the comparisons between categories seem legit for now.

The total average bottom-range number of all responses is $49 per hour.

Remember that correlation does not equal causation! It might be that girls who make more money end up being financially secure which leads to less depression. It might also be that girls who are prone to depression have this affect their work life, thus leading to lower income. I don’t know which one it is. Maybe/probably both.

Income and age:
I would guess that newer girls tend to be younger, and as thus have a less established base and less income. The income increases once the base is established, but drops off once get too ripe.

This seems to hold somewhat true. The 27-32 and the 33+ year old categories each generally have been camming for the same amount of time, but those over 33 make substantially less. The 23-26 year olds have cammed for less time than the 27+ age group, but make more money.

If you’ll notice I fucked up a bit when asking about length of camming. If you’ll also notice, there’s no difference in income between girls who have cammed 0-6 months and girls who’ve cammed 6-12 months. 2 years is where it really starts to take off. I don’t know about that dip in the 3rd year.

So far it looks like the secret to success is “start camming really young” and “cam for a long time.”

(Due to low answers, I combined people who answered “1” or “2” into just “2”, and same for 6-7)

Looks like 3/7 bodyweight earns the most – with an interesting spike at the heavier end. Is this a sign of niche preference for fluffier ladies?

This one is pretty obvious. Remember we don’t know which causes which – the income or the time put in!

Turns out the ‘0-5′ and the ’40+’ categories have only around 20 responses each, so expect higher variance there.
That being said, all ways I looked at the data showed a spike around 10-20 hours a week, and 40+ hours a week. Is this indicative of two different types of successful camgirl strategies?

I took out the ‘0-1’ category because there were few responses, but the average reported income for 0-1 days was very low. I say this because I don’t understand why 2 days a week is so high.

That being said, the hours and days correlation is beautifully strong.

But it looks like there’s a bit of two sweet spots here – working 2 days a week, or 10-15 hours, and working 40+ hours a week, or 5 days a week.
There wasn’t enough data to look closely at the distinctions of hours ‘more’ than 40 a week, but I would guess it falls off at the upper ends, much like days of week falls off once you work over 5 days a week.

Remember: correlation does not equal causation. Working more than 5 days a week does not mean you will make less per hour – it’s very possible that 7-day girls are also ones who work from studios, or split-cam, or something, and thus bring down the income numbers. I don’t know.

(I combined responses in 1-5 and 9-10 due to low counts)
And maybe the obvious thing we all want to ignore – hotter (at least self-reported hotter) girls make more money. A 6/10 girl will make, on average, a whopping $33 less per hour than a 9/10 girl.

Of course it’s possible girls who think they are hotter are more confident, and confidence is what earns more money. I personally doubt this, however.

For this question, I asked girls to rank themselves in comparison to other camgirls (for income), and then compared it to the actual income ranking.

There might be something fucky going on with the way I organized the data, but from this it looks like girls who rated themselves “3” or “4” (out of 7) in comparison to other camgirls are overrating themselves. You 3 and 4 girls, you’re doing worse than you think!

Blonde and Brunette competes for the goal, while ‘Other’ lags behind. (grey was an option, but there were so few responders that I filtered that out.) There’s a pretty significant difference in income, with ‘other’ hair colors earning $24 less per hour.

I thought that maybe less attractive people tend to dye their hair weird colors, so I looked at the correlation between hair color and self-rated attractiveness. There was no significant correlation (the biggest difference was 7.26 at black hair, and 7.52 at blonde hair, which I don’t think is a huge difference? ‘Other’ was 7.45, anyway).

Here, “1” was “no sexualness” and “7” was “very explicit. I interpret this as “non-nude” models doing ok, and “kinda sexy girls” doing ok, with everyone else failing for some reason. I really don’t understand that huge difference between 3 and 4.

The question was “Do you drink or do other drugs specifically to assist with cam performance or coping with camming?”

I thought maybe this is due to correlation with camming time – girls who cam for a long time eventually turn to drugs or alcohol to cope/help. I was right!


I merged ‘no’ (very few responses) into ‘rarely.’
And, as is unsurprising, the more girls talk to their members off cam, the higher their income.

This is the question that started it all! I wanted to know if girls who vocalize their disapproval of freeloaders tend to make more or less money. Girls who say ‘no’ or ‘rarely’ make more money than girls who say ‘frequently’ or ‘occasionally’ – though frequently makes more money than occasionally. I don’t know what that’s about.

Here, ‘1’ was low on the “how much do you do games” scale, and ‘7’ was high.

This is really interesting. Girls who say they are 7 on the scale of games do way better than everyone else.

Interestingly, Chaturbate cammers do worse than ‘other.’ Unsurprisingly, MFC girls rake in the big bucks.

Girls who use 1 site make $28 more per hour than girls who use 2.

The question was, what percentage of your income comes from your top 3 tippers?
(each answer was a range; ’90’ on the graph was ’90-100%’ range in the answer selection)

The question was about whether girls vocalize their complaints about slow days. The results weren’t strong and it appears as though this doesn’t have any significant effect on income.

Girls who pretend they are single make $18/hr more than girls who admit they aren’t.
However girls who don’t have a SO at all make even less. Most probably, men are less likely to tip girls who they know are dating someone. However a few things:

Girls who have jealous SOs might be more open about them, and jealous SOs might be less supportive of camming in other areas.
Girls with supportive SOs might put less pressure on them to disclose their relationship.
Girls who don’t have any SOs might have much less help in camming overall.

Although – are less attractive girls less likely to date? Let’s check.

Nope! No correlation to attractiveness (biggest difference is 0.12).
I suspect this indicates that SOs provide a great deal of behind-the-scenes assistance and motivation.

It’s also possible that girls without SOs also tend to have fewer household expenses, and thus need to make less money to support themselves, and so take camming less seriously.

I don’t think I had enough data to make good predictions about age and relationship status, but it’s possible older women still camming are more likely to be single, and older women make less money.

“For pay” category had low response number, so don’t take it too seriously.
That being said, 22.4% of girls reported having sexual contact with their members, 15% of it voluntary. Girls who have had voluntary sexual contact with their members make more money. I think this is just that girls who cam longer both tend to make more and tend to eventually become more likely to sex a member. I checked – girls who haven’t sex’d a member have been camming on average 2.55 years, and those who ‘have’ voluntarily sex’d a member have cammed on average 3.62

Had low-ish (25) numbers for ‘yes, very much’ so take it with a grain of salt.

Here, 1 was ‘very alternative, tattoos, piercings, etc.’ and 7 was ‘very traditional; no piercings, long hair, etc.’

Generally speaking, the more traditional a camgirl looks, the higher her income.

0-4 were combined due to low answer volume.
Looks like girls who either don’t take their work home with them, or do, make the most.

I initially did this as correlation between parents and income, but then I figured it’s probably more just about ‘how long have you been camming,’ and I think I was right. The longer a camgirl has been camming, the more likely it is that their parents know.

Since the graph cuts it off – the first ‘yes” is “mostly accepting,” and the second “yes” is “mostly disapproving.”

And, as a last bonus: non-nude models (both strictly and loosely, so probably including ‘teasy’ models) make only $4 less per hour than nude models!

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So in summary: Start camming early. Be young. Have cammed a lot. Work either really hard or kinda hard, but nowhere in between. Be traditional. Don’t have weird colored hair. Do drugs and drink. Don’t have anxiety. Cam on MFC (only) and do a ton of games. Be super hot. Talk to your members offline. Have sex with your members. Get a boyfriend but don’t tell anyone about it. Don’t be too graphically sexy. Be kinda skinny but not too skinny.

And whalah, you have the recipe (or a description, at least) of a successful camgirl!

If you’re interested in taking more surveys, all currently open ones are under the ‘surveys’ tab above, and I will tweet about new ones I add. This survey has taught me a lot about what things to avoid in survey making, and hopefully the next one will be a lot more accurate, fine-tuned, and useful!

Thank you everyone for your help!