The billion dollar adult streaming industry is fueled by horrific labor abuses

The fantasy of the influencer economy is about finding an audience for your content, being swept by the wind of the algorithm, and living a glamorous life with all the money you make. And someone is definitely making money.

Take adult webcams, for example, a billion-dollar global industry in which content creators build dedicated followings while broadcasting to meet endless demand. But far from dreaming of mansions and diamonds and luxury cars, a new report finds that webcam models are often making pennies on the dollar in deplorable conditions where they face bugs and cockroaches, dirt and shared streaming equipment often covered in semen, blood, vomit, or feces.

Research released this week by Human Rights Watch sheds light on conditions in one of the centers of the adult camming industry, Colombia. Working with two organizations led by sex workers in the country, HRW found that models are sent for hours on end in dirty studios that provide the bare minimum of equipment and facilities. The studios usually keep workers under constant surveillance to make sure they don’t take breaks, even to drink water. And most charge extra for essentials like soap, sanitizer and tissues.

“There was an epidemic of rashes on our hands and fingers because of dirty keyboards, and it just spread,” a 33-year-old webcam model based in Bogotá told HRW in October 2023. “But really, mental health problems are the worst.”

Many cammers come to the big cities of Colombia to use studios because they cannot afford a computer and other streaming equipment. They are working to save enough money so they can eventually go on their own. But between the cut of the revenue that popular streaming platforms like BongaCams, Chaturbate, LiveJasmin and Stripchat take, and the percentage taken by the studios, the models are left with very little. And perhaps worst of all, even if they want to switch to a different studio or save enough to go out on their own, studio heads almost always control the cammers’ streaming accounts and generally refuse to release them – and the precious followers cammers have earned.

The situation is particularly complex, HRW researcher Erin Kilbride says, because the immediate and horrific labor abuses inflicted by studio owners can obscure the larger context — the report says streaming services lack corporate responsibility on the human toll of content creation on their platforms.