Digital geishas

With the traditional adoration of female beauty in Colombia, together with rapidly developing telecommunications technologies and infrastructure, the millennial generations of Colombian girls having grown up with YouTube, turned the city of Medellín during the past few years into a one of the world centers of webcam modelling, a booming interractive sex industry.

While the capital of European webcam business is Romania, the main hub of camming in Americas is Colombia. Thousands of young Colombian women stream everyday self-directed shows via camming websites like LiveJasmin, Chaturbate or MyFreeCams that allow the global viewers, mostly from the U.S. and Europe, to personally interract with a model by text messages and to pay them “tips” for certain, usually sexually related acts.

Although the core of the show is always based on stripping, the crucial part of a cam model’s success in the highly competitive adult industry environment is communication. Cam models who have the ability of light conversation, flirting and entertaining the viewer (dancing, singing, making any kind of artistic performance) usually earn significantly more than those who only get nude and do not interract. The most successful cam girls have moved far beyond the borders of sexuality and literally share their whole lives in a constant interaction with their online clients, communicating with them via texting, sending pictures or private video sessions, often multiple times a day. However, a personal encounter is rarely accepted and the relationship is strictly developed in the cyberspace.

Cam models are paid in a virtual currency called “tokens”, converted into dollars by the website which charges a service fee for providing a technological platform for performers. The vast majority of nameless models, working shifts in webcam studios, generally do not earn more than a couple of hundreds of dollars per month, but the successful and famous ones, broadcasting independently from their luxury apartments in the wealthy neighborhood of El Poblado, easily reach up to ten thousand dollars a month. Additionally, they control their content and build their own personal brands.

However, in a highly religious and family related society of Colombia, most of the cam models fight with the social stigma of being a prostitute. They strictly hide their identity because performing for a large online audience brings a risk of being blackmailed and harassed by anonymous users who threat to expose a model’s profession and explicit images to her friends and family members.

Unlike traditional prerecorded pornographic content, a cam performance is impossible to pirate due to its nature based on real time interactivity with the viewers. The top sites like LiveJasmin regularly exceed 30 million visitors a month.

In 2016, media reported that camming is generating around $2 billion in annual revenue and has become the most lucrative sector of the online adult industry nowadays.

Photography by Jan Sochor