Livanddrew draws most of her audience from men. To view her broadcasts, they must first complete an extensive registration process that includes providing their photograph, age/gender specifications, username/password combination and real email address.
Once registered, users have access to Chaturbate’s 4,500+ rooms – most featuring female models in various sexual poses and scenarios. A common strategy among many models is to target a specific niche and cultivate it thoroughly to build up a strong reputation within that community, in hopes of improving their ranking on the site’s homepage and co-determining their earnings with tips. A higher ranking means more visibility thus an increased likelihood of receiving tips.
Models looking to increase their rankings rely on the platform’s ‘board placement’ mechanism, which efficiently organizes thumbnails of their live shows in an algorithmically ordered order. Therefore, success for models lies directly in being visible on both its homepage and top rows.
Attaining such visibility, however, is no sure thing; the platform’s algorithm is constantly being updated, and model ranks can suddenly decline if they do not perform as promised or meet viewer expectations.
As models try to escape their downward spirals, some have taken drastic measures in order to stay competitive. One such tactic involves cultivating a large following on social media platforms like Twitter by creating a “follow button.” Once clicked upon, viewers who click it will automatically receive notifications when their chosen model goes online for shows.
The second contentious strategy involves exploiting features of the platform to maximize engagement and monetization, such as offering viewers rewards that encourage them to remain longer in models’ rooms or purchase additional services such as private shows.
These strategies have contributed significantly to the expansion of adult entertainment industry and have given birth to a whole host of microentrepreneurs. While these strategies may provide temporary rewards, their critics remain, especially when rewards stop coming in and models must switch their ‘hustle’ for another source of income.
However, while such strategies may seem pervasive, their exact effectiveness in offsetting financial risks associated with cam modeling on Chaturbate remains unknown. In this next article, we examine two controversial strategies and their repercussions for developing a deeper understanding of how Chaturbate organizes market competition while configuring sociotechnical opportunities and constraints. We delve further into the role of what we term ‘manufactured uncertainty” in Chaturbate’s moral and entrepreneurial discourses that drive her hustle. 2019 MIT Press; all rights are reserved by them and may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, redistributed without prior consent of MIT Press; please read their Terms of Use before using this material.