You may perform on third-party websites for fun or as a side hustle, but starting your own adult webcam site is a serious undertaking. There are mainly two major ways to earn from the adult webcam industry as a webcam model on webcam sites:
- You can earn on third-party sites and pay a portion of your earnings as commission,
- You can build your own webcam site, invite webcam models, and earn from the commissions.
If you are interested in building your own webcam site, this guide will offer critical information such as, how to start a webcam business using different approaches, how a script like xCams can reduce your time-frame and expenditure exponentially, and what aspects can influence the cost of your overall venture. So let’s understand this in detail.
How to Start a Webcam Site Using Different Ways?
There are two popular ways to build a webcam site for camming business:
- Scratch: You can build your website from scratch by following a complete Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC).
- Adult webcam script: You can use a turnkey adult webcam script to set up a webcam site without writing any code by yourself.
Building an Adult Webcam Site from Scratch
To build a webcam site from scratch you need to spend on the following verticals:
- Purchasing a domain name
You can purchase a domain name from any website registrar. The cost of your domain name will depend on two factors:
- The sub-domain you choose: .com, .info, .io, etc.
- The plan you pick: Individually, or as a package with a web hosting plan.
- Availability of the domain extension with the domain registrar.
Sometimes, individuals lock popular domain names and resell them for high prices. Normally, domain names cost around $10-$40/year, but the prices could go up depending on a lot of factors.
- Purchasing a web hosting plan
Although there are tons of web-hosting companies, it is recommended to use a dedicated adult web hosting server for your webcam site. Depending on your requirements, you can select from different types of servers:
- Shared Servers
- Cloud Servers
- Elastic cloud servers
- Virtual servers
- Dedicated servers
- Virtual private Servers etc.
Here is an estimate from a popular adult web hosting provider, Vice Temple:
Adult Share hosting ($5/month)
- Free SSL Certificates
- 1 Dedicated IP
- 15 GB Storage
Adult Virtual Server ($15/Month)
- 1 GB RAM
- 1 Core CPU
- Free SSL
- 10 GB storage
- 1 Dedicated IP
- Full root Access
Adult Dedicated Server ($110/month) (recommended)
- 4 GB RAM
- 4 Core CPU
- 1 Dedicated IP
- Free SSL Certificate
- Full Root Access
- IPMI
Which service provider to choose?
It depends on your requirements. However, you must look for at least the following aspects:
- The Scale of your website
- Flexible Service Level Agreement
- Free SSL certificate
- FREE domain name for 1 year
- Maximum uptime
- Prompt technical support
- No restrictions on adult content
- Purchasing a CDN and Media Server
A web-hosting server can host your website’s source code, but they are not powerful enough to host or route media streaming files. You need a media streaming server that will host your live streaming videos and a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that will ensure lower latency and buffer-less streaming of the videos on the user’s device.
CDN and Media Server are not different things. A CDN is made up of an interconnection of multiple media servers located in different regions. For example, Netflix uses AWS CDN and Media Servers to ensure high-quality streaming across global regions. You too must pick a decent CDN service like AWS, Azure, Cloud Flare, or M3CDN. A decent CDN plan can be bought for as lows as $16/Month.
- Purchasing Encoders, Decoders, and Video Players
These are generally a collection of software and hardware solutions that perform the following tasks on your adult webcam site:
- Encoder: Encode the videos from the live streamer’s camera and convert it into data packets that can be transmitted over the internet via CDN and Media Servers. There are both software (cheap) and hardware (expensive) encoders in the market.
- Decoders: Decode data-packets on the user-end and convert them back into media files that can be played on a user’s media-playing device (mobile, computer, etc.).
- Video Player: Play decoded media files on the user’s device and offer playback controls such as play, pause, fast-forward, Stop, etc.
You can get all three solutions individually, or you can also purchase a combined solution for all. For example, Wowza provides all three components in a combo media server package that start at $95/month.
- Purchasing Adult Payment Solutions
Please note that most of the mainstream payment solutions like PayPal, Stripe, and First Data do not allow adult websites. Just like adult web hosting services, you need adult payment gateways to manage high-risk transactions on your adult webcam site.
The fee these payment solutions charge are subject to several factors. For example, the merchant’s processing history, your industry (high or low risk), and/or expected sales volume. Each merchant account is different, but include typical fees such as:
- Merchant Account Fee
- Transaction Fee
- Discount Rate
- Merchant Account Registration Fee
- Monthly Statement Fee
- Chargeback Fee
- Refund Fee
Cardinity is an example of high-risk payment gateways. It charges 1.35% + €0.25 for EU and EEA cards. It also provides custom plans for per-month transactions over 50,000 Euros.
- Hiring Webcam Models
The cost of hiring webcam models for your website is subjected to a lot of factors; it’s not fixed. Besides, hiring webcam girls is not an easy job for a newly launched website. To get sustainable growth, you need at least 10-20 webcam girls to sign-up every day.
This demands aggressive digital marketing, advertisements, email marketing, social media engagement, payments to model recruitment agencies, commissions to affiliate model partners. Even after spending so much, webcam models hardly settle upon one site for long. If they don’t see any growth in their income, they will simply stop coming online and move to some other promising platform.
You need to pay lucrative shares and incentives to keep these models engaged on the platform. About 40% of all your initial investments would go in hiring and engaging webcam models.
- Building your webcam site
If you are building your webcam site from scratch, get ready to invest over 50% of your venture capital in this project. A simple webcam site would demand at least 1500 hours of development, and it does not include research, designing, testing, and deployment costs. Let’s assume that this combined work would take 2500 hours.
Taking US development costs as low as $100/hour, such a project will cost you at least $250,000. Now, you can calculate the overall initial investments you are required to make while developing your adult webcam site from scratch.
Developing Your Adult Webcam Site Using xCams Script
xCams is a self-hosted adult webcam script with unencrypted source-code access. To use xCams, you need to follow the below steps:
- Purchase xCams by paying a one-time cost.
- Download the source code and install it on a web hosting server. (technical support is provided)
- Follow a GUI to log in to the back-end panel and setting up your website with:
- Static web pages
- Site configuration
- Payment gateway settings
- Google Analytics configuration
- Personalize the front-end with your brand-logo and banners.
- Activate xCams model API to get pre-populated webcam models on your website.
- Or, take the website live and start receiving model sign-ups and user traffic.
If you use xCams to build your adult webcam site, you can save all costs associated with points 6 and 7, which is almost 80% of your overall investment. The one-time price of xCams, starts at $699 only, as of now. This is nothing as compared to the required investment of at least $250,000 to develop your Minimum Viable Product (MVP) from scratch.
To Conclude
I hope you now have a decent idea about how to start a webcam site business without spending a fortune. While both of these options are equally competent in different situations, I am kind of biased towards using an adult webcam script as much as possible. I recommend development from scratch only in situations when you can’t find any ready-made solution that fits your requirement or cannot be customized to fit.
Most of the time, a ready-made webcam script with open source-code access can either support all your requirements out of the box, or it can be customized to accommodate your additional requirements. You can use xCams or any other turnkey script that you find suitable for your cause. Just make sure that it is available with unencrypted source-code, can be self-hosted, and offers comprehensive documentation so any skilled developer can make the customizations that you may need immediately or sometime in the future, too.
I mean, if you can get something for as low as $699, why would you spend $250,000 in re-inventing the wheel?
Interesting Related Article: “How to Earn More From Your Website“