The Billion-Dollar Adult Streaming Industry Is Fueled by Horrific Labor Abuses

The fantasy of the influencer economy is to find an audience for your content, be swept away on the winds of the algorithm, and live a glamorous life with all the money you’re making. And someone is certainly making money.

Take adult web-camming, for example, a billion-dollar global industry in which content creators build up devoted followings as they stream themselves to meet endless demand. But far from the dream 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 bedbugs and cockroaches, filth, and shared streaming equipment often covered in semen, blood, vomit, or feces.

Research released this week by Human Rights Watch shines a light on conditions in one of the adult camming industry’s hubs, Colombia. Working with two sex-worker-led organizations in the country, HRW found that models stream for hours on end in filthy studios that provide the bare minimum of equipment and facilities. The studios typically keep workers under constant surveillance to make sure they aren’t taking 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 the dirty keyboards, and it just kept spreading,” one 33-year-old webcam model based in Bogotá told HRW in October 2023. “But really, the mental health issues are the worst.”

Many cammers come to Colombia’s big cities to use studios because they can’t afford a computer and other streaming equipment. They work to save up enough money so they can eventually go off 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 studios, models are left with very little. And perhaps worst of all, even if they want to switch to a different studio or save up enough to go out on their own, studio bosses almost always control the cammers’ streaming accounts and will typically refuse to release them—and the valuable followings the cammers have earned.

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