What I'm (Re)Watching: American Psycho
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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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Sex Sales
Today on Forbes.com, I wrote about Etsy banning adult toy sales, among a host of other new constraints imposed on people who hawk mature wares on the e-commerce platform. You can read it right here.
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Meet The Strip Club CEO Who Wants To Get Guys Off Their Phones And Into The Clubs
A dancer works a convention crowd, Las Vegas, NV | Photo credit: Susannah Breslin
This article was originally published on Forbes.com on May 9, 2022.
“Everybody wants to party.” That’s how Eric Langan, the CEO, president, and chairman of the board of RCI Hospitality Holdings, Inc., the only publicly traded company that owns gentleman’s clubs, describes the state of his business today. Pandemic? Fuggedaboutit. Two years of dark news, quarantining, and masks have resulted in a surge of consumers who want to go out and have fun. The strip club business may not be pandemic proof, but according to Langan, it’s pandemic resistant. After an initial dip early on in the pandemic, the company has come roaring back and is doing better than ever. According to Langan, its suite of businesses are on track to generate between $260 million and $280 million in revenue in 2022.
You might not have heard of RCI Hospitality Holdings, which trades on Nasdaq under the symbol RICK, but you may have heard of its establishments, which include over forty strip clubs and restaurants. Among its gentleman’s clubs are Rick’s Cabaret and Vivid Cabaret in New York City; Club Onyx, which has outposts in Houston, Charlotte, St. Louis, and Indianapolis; and Tootsie’s Cabaret in Miami. (“The place is so big they've got a giant room in the back for making the furniture upon which the laps get their dances,” this reporter discovered during a 2015 visit.) There’s also Bombshells, a military-themed chain of restaurants and bars (think: Hooters, but the servers wear fake ammunition belts instead of orange shorts) with multiple locations across Texas. The company brand is a mix of food, booze, and attractive women. The company went public, as Rick’s Cabaret International, in 1995 and hasn’t looked back since.
“They’re having fun,” he notes of the twenty-something to forty-something customers who are frequenting his establishments. “They’re way more into experiences than things. They want human interaction. They want to be seen. They want to be heard. They want to flex in front of their friends. It’s about being out and feeling like you’re somebody.” The pandemic isolated people, restricted their freedom, kept them apart. “This is just a retaliation against that lack of freedom,” he observes. “Now they’re expressing their freedom in every way they can. I think it’s great.”
So, how do you pry the young men whom comprise his customer base off their sofas, away from their Netflix shows, out of their homes and into his clubs and restaurants to spend their money? Thanks in part to Langan’s son Colby, the company’s director of administrative operations, who introduced his father to NFTs, “the crypto world,” and web3, RCI Hospitality Holdings is strategically employing a series of tech-focused initiatives. There’s AdmireMe, a kind of OnlyFans for dancers—or “entertainers,” as Langan refers to them—that connects dancers to customers; Tip-N-Strip, an NFT-based points-program with VIP benefits; and the company’s next earnings call, on Monday, May 9, 2022, at 4:30 p.m. ET, will be held on Twitter Spaces.
“We’ve become a mainstream company,” Langan asserts. “Yes, we have strip clubs, but really we’re in the cash flow business.” Of course, his job isn’t like every other CEO’s job. (“I’m the head janitor,” he says.) Active on Twitter, he’s not one for holding back. “Diamond Cabaret Denver has so many beautiful entertainers tonight,” he tweeted not long ago. “I can’t decide if it should be a blonde or brunette kinda night. What do you think ?” In another tweet, he advised his followers: “Just remember you can take the stripper out of the club but you can’t take the club out of the stripper !!!” No matter. In the end, this is the strip club (and restaurant) business. After the Twitter Spaces earnings call, he’ll be mingling with investors at Tootsie’s, along with a few dancers.
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The Couple
A couple peering in through my car window. Follow me on Instagram for more photos from my life in L.A.
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Forbes by the Numbers: January 2023
I’ve been writing for the Forbes website for forever, it seems. Over the years, I have held several beats: self-employment, vices, and sex. Currently, my tagline is: “I cover the business of sex.” In January 2023, I started posting again after a hiatus, and I thought I would track my traffic numbers progress here.
Stories published: 4. My goal was to publish five stories, but various things led that to not happening. Next time, I will get more of the posts done earlier in the month.
Total page views: 42,956. My goal was to double my page views from December 2022, when I wasn’t posting. My page views in December 2022 were 22,353. That’s an increase of 91%. So, not bad.
Total visitors: 39,011. My goal was to double my page views from December 2022, when I wasn’t posting. My page views in December 2022 were 20,155. That’s an increase of 93%. So, not bad.
Most popular post, by views: How Rapper Iggy Azalea Is Making Money on Only Fans: 19,381 (as of this writing). If the question is what works, the answer is the intersection of celebrities and sex. Other reasons this post performed well: It was tweeted multiple times by Forbes and ForbesLife, the top image featured Iggy preparing to lick a cherry, I had read something recently that reminded me that headlines that explain “how” something is done are more likely to generate higher engagement and so I used that construct.
The month’s highlight: Iggy is #1: At one point, my story about Iggy was the number one trending story on Forbes.com, beating out stories about Tom Brady and Elon Musk.
The Hidden Pervert
Estate sale, Encino, Calif. (Photo credit: Susannah Breslin)
My latest newsletter is out. It features the perversions of dead people’s houses. Read it here. Subscribe here.
I’d assumed the place had belonged to an older gay man who had spent his final years contentedly rendering artistic homages to the penis, but when I got to the bedroom, I realized the deceased resident had been an older woman.
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A Mini-Movie Starring Me
The conference that’s considering having me do a 60-minute presentation on how to sell yourself asked me if I had any relevant video, which I didn’t, so I made a 5-minute video of myself talking about how to sell yourself. It was pretty easy to do. I used Photo Booth on my Mac. I put on a sensible top to look reasonable and glasses to look smart. I talked about being a Swiss army knife, the best advice I ever got from a TV producer, and why business jargon sucks. It probably took eight tries, and I learned that I say “um” and “like” a lot. Then, I sent it, and I was done.
Buy my digital short story, “The Tumor” … “a masterpiece of short fiction.”
WTF, Women?
As seen on a Barnes & Noble bookstore shelf today: a copy of Melissa Orr’s Lean Out: The Truth About Women, Power, and the Workplace, and a copy of Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. Needless to say, I didn’t buy either. Instead, I bought a copy of Ray Dalio’s Principles: Life and Work.
Buy my digital short story, “The Tumor” … “a masterpiece of short fiction.”
Don't Give Away Your Right To Negotiate For Yourself (Updated)
Nowadays, it’s not uncommon to find a clause like this in a contract for a freelance article.
(*see below for an update)
Image via Magic: The Gathering
Read your contract in full before signing it. Don’t skim-read it on autopilot.
Do not agree to terms like these. You are giving away your right to negotiate.
Explain the clause must be removed from this contract in order for you to sign it.
“10. Film/TV/Audiovisual Works: You hereby grant and assign to [redacted] exclusive decision-making, signing authority, and rights with respect to feature film, motion picture, video game, mobile application, television, episodic programming, and any other audiovisual work based on or derived from the Work.
[Redacted] agrees to make good faith efforts to consult with you before signing any such ancillary rights agreements.
Any monies actually received by [Redacted] upon optioning and/or selling the Work (after deduction of [Redacted]’s actual, out-of-pocket costs and expenses, including, without limitation, agency fees and other fees and expenses related to sale and exploitation thereof) will be distributed as follows:
Fixed Compensation.
i) Option Fees/Purchase Price: 50% to [Redacted], 50% to you
ii) Royalties and/or Series Sales Bonuses (if any): 50% to [Redacted], 50% to you
iii) Contributor Writing or Consulting Fee (if any): 100% to you
iv) Executive Producer, Producer, or Similar Fees for [Redacted] or its employees/contractors (if any): 100% to [Redacted].
Contingent Compensation and box office bonuses (if any): 50% to [Redacted], 50% to You
It’s acknowledged that [Redacted] may have a first look or overall deal with a third party, and any guaranteed fees associated with such an agreement are expressly excluded.
Accounting statements with respect to any ancillary exploitation of rights pursuant to this Section and payments, if any, will be delivered to you within 90 days following receipt by [Redacted] of the actual monies and such statements from third party purchasers or licensees of such rights.
It is agreed and understood that the services you are furnishing under this Agreement are extraordinary, unique, and not replaceable, and that there is no fully adequate remedy at law in the event of your breach of this Agreement, and that in the event of such a breach, [Redacted] shall be entitled to equitable relief by way of injunction or otherwise. You also recognize and confirm that in the event of a breach by [Redacted] of its obligations under this Agreement, the damage, if any, caused to you by [Redacted] is not irreparable or sufficient to entitle you to injunctive or other equitable relief. Consequently, your rights and remedies are limited to the right, if any, to obtain damages at law and you will not have any right in such event to terminate or rescind this Agreement or any of the rights granted by you hereunder or to enjoin or restrain the development, production and exploitation of the rights granted pursuant to this Agreement.”
I requested the clause be removed. The editor declined, describing the contract as “writer-friendly.” I declined to sign.
Buy "The Tumor" — my short story that’s been called "a masterpiece of short fiction."
That's a Lot of Toys
Image credit: Brett Hammond
"Some experts, like Sara Ramirez, the associate publisher for retailing for the adult entertainment trade publication XBIZ, agree that Americans buy somewhere between $1 billion and $2 billion worth of pleasure products annually. A more conservative estimate from IBISWorld pegged that number at $610 million in 2013 and projected it to grow to $792 million by 2018."
[NYT]
Sex vs. God
Two adult stores and a church are battling it out on Wisconsin billboards.
Image credit: Daughter Number Three
"And in the midst of the billboards beckoning shoppers to stores offering sex toys and pornographic videos are equally large signs declaring that 'Porn Destroys Love' and asking if you've 'Got God?'"
[LAT]
How Much I Got Paid: #8
"The Obscenity Police Are Coming," Forbes.com, September 2012
Title: Contributor
Publication: Forbes.com
Date: 2011 - 2014
Word count: N/A
Payment: See below
Notes: I blogged for Forbes.com for three years. Looking back, I would describe the experience as "awesome." Sure, assholes like this dumb fuck can say contributors like me besmirched the Forbes brand, but, for me, it was a great gig. My first post was about what it was like to get shitcanned, my most popular post (1.5M+ views) revealed how hard it is to be a male porn star, I shot a gun for fun, I wrote about being diagnosed with breast cancer five days after it happened, and I ate a hamburger topped with an unconsecrated communion wafer. My editors were the great: they got out of my way and let me do what I do. One of the best things about blogging for Forbes is that when you ask people if they're interested in being interviewed, they almost always say yes. For a journalist, it was like scoring one of Willy Wonka's Golden Tickets. I was paid a flat fee every month, which required a minimum of five posts a month. On top of that, I was paid a certain amount for how much traffic I generated; I was paid a certain amount for one-time visitors and a higher amount for repeat visitors. The last couple months, I made around $5,000 a month because I wrote this.
Conclusion: Sometimes I miss it.
1M
"What Porn Stars Do When the Porn Industry Shuts Down" reached 1,000,000 views on Forbes.
"Raven-haired, heavily tattooed Adahlia is one such provider. 'Many adult actors such as myself also work as private companions, so thankfully the moratorium on filming hasn’t affected me financially, although it has emotionally,' she says. 'My heart goes out to those whose health has been affected.'"
This Is Branding
Photo credit: Clayton Cubitt
If you're a creative working in the gig economy, Kim Boekbinder's terrific interview with photographer Clayton Cubitt is a must-read: "Thriving in the Attention Economy."
"Artists shouldn’t kid themselves that most people give a fuck about them directly. At least not at first. People want what you’ve made, they don’t want you. You have to seduce them into also wanting you. And you can only do that by making more stuff that they want, and hopefully attaching yourself to it in the minds of some small percentage of its fans. This is branding."
[Medium]
What She Said
Photo credit: Henrik Purienne via This Isn't Happiness
"Maybe it’s just me but doesn’t it seem the entire system for performers in Porn Valley is set for failure? There is no career in porn for 99.45 percent of these girls. The talent agencies are really nothing more than walk in Ready Labor outfits with zero benefits. Get in line…perhaps you’ll work…perchance you won’t. Step out of line and voice your concern, to the back of the line with you. For most performers in Porn Valley that’s the reality. The quick paycheck is the nail in the coffin. Used by the agents and producers alike, it is the best career suicide diversion of all time. The talent base in LA has yet to grasp that and also figure out that everything and anything they shoot or will shoot in LA was or is going to be sold, resold, repackaged, resold again and then promptly shipped to the tube sites where the real damage subsequently begins to their careers. Just about every performer who has more than 15 or 20 scenes in LA is so saturated on the tube sites; she is simply not marketable anymore. Why would she be? She is on every tube site a thousand times over…for the low price of free. That kind of saturation can be insurmountable. She gets a few scenes here and there, and before you know it she is doing the million man double anal cream pie followed by an anal toilet brush reaming for $500. The vast majority of Porn Valley performers are destined for the industry standard of an extremely short career that seems to be so popular among them. The good news is that their retirement package ensures that they will always be able to log on to PornHub and watch their own scenes for free in HD…for eternity…resting comfortably knowing they will never be paid another dime for any of it. Perhaps that is why I really don’t know of any “porn stars” right now…just a bunch of talent passing through Porn Valley and landing permanently on Porn Hub. Maybe these other girls…you know the ones who seem to be doing so well outside of Los Angeles…are on to something. I could be wrong."
This Is Business
I just got my new business cards. I ordered them from MOO. They're heavy, well-made, and cool. They arrived quickly, and I designed them online in about 15 minutes. Thanks to Len Kendall for the referral.
Porn Industry Shutdown
What happens when the porn business shuts down? I found out in my latest post for Forbes: "What Porn Stars Do When the Porn Industry Shuts Down."
"'The moratoriums are always very difficult for a majority of the performers in the adult industry,' says Chanel Preston, a four-year veteran who’s slated to co-host the 2014 AVN Awards — otherwise known as the 'Oscars of porn' — next month in Las Vegas.
For stars with exclusive contracts that guarantee regular paychecks from big production companies, the money is steady. For the rest, not so much.
'Despite the amount of money that performers make, most still live paycheck-to-paycheck, so having your income cut off for a few weeks is a huge damper financially,' Preston says."
[Forbes]
How Much I Got Paid: #7
Title: Digital copywriter
Publication: N/A
Date: N/A
Word count: N/A
Payment: $100/hour
Notes: In February of 2011, I was downsized from a full-time job I had as an editor for a popular Time Warner website for women. That day, I wrote a post on my blog titled "Hire Me." Not long after, I heard from a man who worked for a big PR company in New York. He talked to me about doing some social media copywriting. He offered me $100 an hour. I took it. Over the next year and a half, I wrote digital copy for some of the world's biggest brands. My favorite assignment was pretending to be a product that talked to its fans on Facebook. I wrote scripts for commercials, became a celebrity tweet ghostwriter, and billed thousands and thousands of dollars. I was good at it, I liked it, and I could generate the online engagement the billion-dollar companies with which I worked wanted so desperately. I was a kind of Facebook whisperer. As a writer, it was the best-paying job I've ever had. One might suggest that marketing copy is thin and meaningless compared to journalism, but the reality is that every writer is in the entertainment business. The question is: How much do you want to get paid for what you do?
Conclusion: There's no shame in paying the bills.
How Much I Got Paid: #6
Title: "The Last Real Porn Star"
Publication: Hysterical Literature
Date: July 15, 2013
Word count: 939
Payment: $0
Notes: In April, my friend Clayton Cubitt asked me to write an essay for a site he would be launching, Hysterical Literature, which would be the digital home of a wildly successful video project he'd undertaken in which he was shooting women reading and orgasming at the same time. The site would feature all the videos and several essays about the project. Did I want to write an essay? Yes, I did. We decided I would write about Stoya, whose video session features the porn star reading an excerpt from Supervert's Necrophilia Variations (as of this writing, Stoya's video has been viewed 10,399,221 times). The essay I wrote features commentary on Stoya, a review of the book, and the answer as to whether or not the man who wrote the book that Stoya reads while orgasming had masturbated to the video of the porn star orgasming while reading his book. I wrote this piece for free. Cubitt is a friend, it gave me a chance to use my brain, and when someone asks if you would like to write an essay about a porn star orgasming while reading a book, you say yes.
Conclusion: Freedom is perception.