Mudanças

In 1996 an American college student and conceptual artist, Jenny Ringley, created a website called "JenniCam." Her web camera was located in her dorm room and automatically photographed her every few minutes. The camera captured Ringley doing almost everything – brushing her teeth, doing her laundry, doing stripteases – and then broadcast its images live over the Internet. Also in 1998, a commercial site called AmandaCam was launched. Amanda's site, like Ringley's, had multiple cameras around her house which allowed people to look in on her. However Amanda made an important early discovery that would influence the camming industry for decades to come – that a website's popularity could be greatly increased by enabling viewers to chat with a performer while online. Within her ''members section'', Amanda made it a point to chat with her viewers for over three hours a day.<ref name=Senft2/> Since the early days of live [[webcast]]s by Ringley and Amanda, the phenomenon of ''camming'' has grown to become a multibillion-dollar industry which has an average of at least 12,500 cam models online at any given time and more than 240,000 viewers at any given time.

A camming website acts as a middleman and talent aggregator by hosting hundreds of independent models, and verifies that all are at least 18 years old.<ref name=Richtel/><ref name=McGehee>{{cite news|last1=McGehee|first1=Cate|title=Camming Is Not Like Any Other Kind of Sex Work|url=https://www.thestranger.com/features/feature/2015/06/10/22360297/camming-is-not-like-any-other-kind-of-sex-work|accessdate=19 January 2018|work=the Stranger|date=10 June 2015}}</ref> Camming websites typically fall into two main categories, dependent upon whether their video [[chat rooms]] are free or private. In private chat rooms, viewers pay by the minute for a private show. However, in free chat rooms payment is voluntary and is in the form of tips, thus providing the model with an income at a minimal cost for the multiple viewers of her chat room's video stream.<ref name=Rachel>{{cite news|last1=Stuart|first1=Rachel|title=Webcamming - The Sex Work Revolution That No One Wants to Talk About|url=https://theconversation.com/webcamming-the-sex-work-revolution-that-no-one-is-willing-to-talk-about-69834|accessdate=17 January 2018|work=The Conversation|date=19 December 2016}}</ref>

''Tips'' are electronic tokens that viewers can buy from a camming website, and then give to the models during live performances to show appreciation. Tokens can also be used buy access to private shows, operate a [[Teledildonics| Teledildonic]] device that a model may be wearing, or used to buy videos and souvenirs from a model.<ref>{{cite web |url=https://www.pornsitestars.com/best-sex-cam-sites |title=27 Top Live Sex Cam Sites You Will Love! |at=Sex Cams Explained |language=en |website=Pornsitestars.com|accessdate=8 Oct 2018}}</ref> The website provides the transactional platform and then collects and distributes a percentage of the tips to the models. For public chat rooms, the model's portion of a tip is a little less than half.<ref name=Richtel/>

Many of the industry’s top webcam models are said to make six figures a year.<ref name=Rabouin/>

Performances can be highly interactive in both public and private video chat rooms. Customers and performers are able to communicate with each other by using keyboard, speech, and two-way cameras.<ref name=Rachel/> Within public chat rooms the audience can see tips and viewer comments as scrolling text which appears next to the real-time video stream. Camgirls will frequently read and respond to the scrolling viewer comments.<ref name=Richtel/> The chatter is constant, and is often led by a small band of regular fans.<ref name=Bartlett/> However this is not the first time that ''conversational interaction'' had become a boon for the erotic entertainment industry. The [[Mitchell Brothers O'Farrell Theatre]] strip club is credited with the invention of the [[lap dance]] when during 1977 their new stage, New York Live, pioneered customer-contact shows with [[stripper]]s that came off the stage and sat in the laps of customers for tips.<ref name=McCumber1>{{cite book | first=David | last=McCumber | pages=78–80, 155 | title=X-Rated | location= New York | publisher= Pinnacle Books | year=1992 | isbn=978-0786011131}}</ref> Enabled with this new revenue stream for strippers, the [[strip club]] industry went through a period of extreme growth during the 1980s. And in the early 20th century sociologist Paul Cressey noted that within the hundreds of [[taxi dance hall|taxi-dance halls]] of America, "the traffic in romance and in feminine society" would become available when [[taxi dancer|taxi dancers]] would offer their companionship and "the illusion of romance" for ten cents a dance.<ref name="Cressey1">{{cite book| last= Cressey | first=Paul| title=The Taxi-Dance Hall: A Sociological Study in Commercialized Recreation and City Life |date=1932 | publisher=University of Chicago Press| location=Chicago, IL| isbn=9780226120515 | page=10–11, 129 }}</ref><ref name="Wright">{{cite news| last1=Wright |first1=Evan | title=Dance With A Stranger |url=http://www.laweekly.com/news/dance-with-a-stranger-2130263 | accessdate=6 February 2018| work=LA Weekly | date=20 January 1999}}</ref>