Meet the Vince Lombardi of Cam Girls

This story was originally published on Forbes.com in August 2015.

Nikki Night is 31, her hair a brilliant shade of ruby red.

Based out of Toronto, she's parlayed a gig as a cam girl into a career coaching other cam girls how to maximize their income.

I talked to Night about the webcam performer gig economy, how she became the Vince Lombardi of cam girls, and what the difference is between cam girls and porn stars.

It's the gig economy

For over a decade, Night was a freelance makeup artist. After she got married, and divorced, she found herself struggling to pay her bills and make rent. "I was actually in kind of a bad spot, money-wise," she says. A girlfriend who was a cam girl suggested Night give it a try. At first, she says, "I was like, what the heck is webcamming?" For about a month, she says, "I hemmed and hawed." Then she gave it a try, and, she says, "It was great."

From the get-go, she approached the business of putting on webcam sex shows as exactly that: a business. She created a file for keeping track of fans and finances, pinning down patterns that empowered her to ncrease her profitability. At the beginning, she wasn't very successful. Still, she kept at it, working 12 hours days, six to seven days a week.

The first month, she made enough to pay her rent. The second month, she doubled that. The third month, she could pay her rent, all her bills, and was making more in monthly income than she ever had as a makeup artist.

Diversify, diversify, diversify

All kinds of people make their living putting on sex cam shows: women, men, straight, gay, trans. "Men make just as much as women do," Night says.

Some performers make $20,000 a month. The average cam girl who works 20 hours a week, Night estimates, earns around $2,500 a month. In one two-hour session, Night made $700. Sometimes, she gets strange requests. She declined to bark like a dog for one customer. She was happy to oblige another viewer who paid her to ignore him. It's up to the performer to decide how far they want to push their professional sexual exhibitionism.

Cam girls make their money through a diverse range of revenue sources. Customers buy tokens they use to tip performers in live shows. Performers can do private shows for customers who are charged by the minute. Some performers sell merchandise: photos, videos, underwear, adult toys, access to the performer's private Twitter feed.

The Vince Lombardi of Cam Girls

Night looks more like Jessica Rabbit than Vince Lombardi, but at CAM4, a popular web cam show site, she's the head of performer training and development. She coaches performers on how to be the best cam performers they can be, from the fine art of broadcasting a live sex show from your bedroom to how you can increase your income by creating your own money-generating, subscriber-based fan club. She recommends the best webcams and shares tips on creating the most flattering lighting.

As far as Night's concerned, the key to outperforming the cam show competition is attitude. "If you go in with the attitude of, 'Give me money, or I'm not doing anything,' you're not going to make money," she notes. She recommends performers watch their own shows and ask themselves: Would I watch me? Would I tip me?

Performers who hustle too hard may limit their potential. Those who engage in "splitcamming," in which performers host multiple shows on multiple cam sites at the same time, can leave customers feeling like "a human ATM."

Cam girls are the new porn stars

"The difference between a cam girl and a porn star is a cam girl has a one-on-one, unscripted relationship with their audience," Night says. In this sex business, technology has cut out the middleman and closed the gap between performer and viewer. With cam girls, she says, "They're free to do whatever they want. It's live." Comparatively, porn lacks immediacy and intimacy, not to mention the ability to deliver exactly what the client wants on demand. "With porn stars, it's directed, it's sold on video," she says. "There's really that break with any kind of relationship with the audience."

That doesn't mean porn is dead, but porn as we know it may be an endangered species. "There will always be porn," Night says, "that will always be." But the source of porn will change. "It's going to become more like porn will come from webcamming, as opposed to it's like a lit, scripted thing."

One day, cam girls may replace porn stars. "The stars will be born from webcamming," she says. "These webcam videos will be porn."

Online, the heart is a lonely hunter

When your job is being a web cam show star, you tend not to have a lot of conference room meetings or water-cooler talk opportunities. It can be a lonely career path. On the internet, you're connected. Offline, you're alone.

"It's like when you're in front of that audience, there's such a high, and there’s such an energy," Night says. "You're laughing, you're meeting people, and then all of a sudden, your show's over, you close your computer, and it's just like the silence is almost deafening. You can’t hear your viewers, you only see them typing, but in your own bedroom there can be hundreds of people, and then it's gone."

Night counsels performers to take care of themselves, to remember there's a world beyond the webcam. "I remember there was one week when I didn't see another human person," she says. "When my cam was off, it was really lonely." But, she says, "You can always go back there and talk to them."

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