LiveJasmin and the Hierarchies of the Global Sexcam Industry: Beyond the Digitalization and Empowerment Narrative

Hungary’s political climate is increasingly dominated by the tensions related to the coming elections in Spring 2022. While all oppositional parties from far-right to the left had joined forces to fight the ruling party Fidesz, a new player entered the political arena in December 2021. György Gattyán, one of the richest people in Hungary, announced his new movement and newly-founded party called Megoldás Mozgalom (MEMO, “Solution Movement”). After several years of distancing himself almost completely from the public arena despite his well-known wealth and potential political and economic power, Gattyán is now highly active in the Hungarian media. His political program is focused on digitalization, which he identifies as the potential solution to all social evils in Hungary. While he is portrayed in PR interviews as an innovative and successful self-made businessman with a strong sense of social responsibility and high moral standards, the main source of his wealth is either obscured or narrated in positive terms. Gattyán’s money mostly comes from the sexcam site LiveJasmin, which is the most profitable business within Docler Holding, Gattyán’s main enterprise. But how does the sexcam industry operate and why is it problematic from a leftist feminist perspective? To explore these questions, we rely on interviews we conducted between 2020–2022 with people formerly or currently working in various roles in the sexcam industry in Hungary, as well as an overview of chat forum discussions around sexcam work. While digitalization is often portrayed in the media as empowering, and LiveJasmin as a platform providing opportunities for women to make good money by selling sexual content, in this article we point to the ways in which the sexcam industry is built on global economic and gender inequalities, and how digital platform companies like LiveJasmin primarily profit from exploiting vulnerable female workers selling sex. We argue that Gattyán is simultaneously promoting the mainstreaming of commodified sexuality and obscuring his and his company’s own role in this process.

What is sex camming? The position of LiveJasmin within the industry

Sex camming emerged along with the development of web cameras and streaming technology in the middle of the 1990s, and spread along with broadband internet in the 2000s. Along with the digitization of the entire sex industry, sex camming has become a global business. Although today there are hundreds of sexcam sites operating worldwide, the market is dominated by the oligopoly of a few companies. Among these is the Hungarian LiveJasmin. LiveJasmin (LJ) was founded in 2001, thus at an early stage of the development of the industry. According to Alexa web analytics, it is still one of the most popular sexcam sites. During the last twenty years sex camming has become a global and highly competitive industry. Despite the differences between the business models of the various platforms, their general structure is the same: customers, webcam models and third parties such as studios register to the sites, and performers get a share of the money paid by the customers. On several sites, this payout percentage of models is around 50%, in the case of LJ it is between 30 and 80% depending on the income of the model. Thus, platforms take a significant amount of the income, without acting as employers and providing any kind of job security – similarly to other “gig economy” platforms such as Uber or FoodPanda. Additionally, platforms also profit from advertisements and selling traffic within the ecosystem of the digital sex industry.

            What differentiates sexcam sites from other segments of the digital sex industry is the live connection between customers and performers, who typically come from opposite ends of the unequal global economy. LJ is a so-called “premium” site, where performers’ shows are only available to paying customers in private chat rooms. The main aim of the performers is thus to make customers spend as much time as possible in private chat rooms, where they pay per minute. Therefore, on premium sites such as LJ, developing personal relationships with regulars is encouraged by the business model.

The global commodity chain of the sexcam industry

The global value chain of the sexcam industry is embedded into the capitalist world-system, and is based on a division of labor between the core, the semi-periphery and the periphery, which also reinforces the inequality of working conditions. As one of our informants put it, “it is a very simple model: Eastern European and South East Asian women are cheap, while in the West, people have a lot of money, they are the customers” (former male Docler employee working in customer care). Indeed, in the case of LJ, the majority of the models are from Romania, Ukraine, Russia, the Philippines, the Republic of South Africa, and Colombia, while the majority of the customers register from the United States and Germany.

In the Philippines, the models typically work for a studio owner “boss” who provides them with the necessary equipment and infrastructure, and who also supervises and controls their work (Mathews 2015). In Colombia and in Eastern Europe, especially Romania, the majority of models also work from studios. In contrast, US- or UK-based models tend to work under more autonomous circumstances, typically registering themselves and working from their own homes. Working conditions in the Philippines were described in the following way by one of our informants: “The kind of shacks I saw as an admin, where they logged in from … they have broadband internet, but the wall behind them is unplastered. And they lie on the ground with just a pillow and a blanket” (former female admin staff at a small platform company, 2020). Moreover, countries also differ in terms of regulations and the legal status of sexcamming: in Russia and the Philippines, such work is illegal, which puts workers in a particularly vulnerable situation. Since platform companies do not function as employers, the risk is borne entirely by the workers.                              

The infrastructure of the sexcam industry on the semi-periphery: the role of studios

​​Although sexcam sites emphasize a direct, personal relationship between performers and customers in their marketing, there is a complex infrastructure facilitating the work of models, including chat operators and studios where models work, which is partly concentrated on the semi-periphery. Models may register on the platforms individually and work from home, however, they can also work from studios. Romania is the current center of studio-based sex camming: according to unofficial estimates, around 5000 studios operate in the country (Vlase and Preoteasa 2021:7). Although many studios operate independently, some of them strongly cooperate with particular platforms. In Hungary, LiveJasmin was already active in the 2000s in establishing infrastructure for its site.  As one of our interviewees told us: “Jasmin never directly owned a studio, but it financed studios in the beginning in order to generate content for its site. I heard that this studio [where I worked] had also started after Gyuri [Gattyán] had given it some money” (former female chat operator, 2020).

According to our informants, in the 2000s studios were mostly running illegally: “I was paid in cash, there was no contract, I received an envelope every Friday” (former male chat operator at a studio, 2020). Today studios seem to be operating legally in Hungary – in 2021, there were at least ten studios in Budapest, and some in other towns that advertised themselves publicly. LJ is still actively building its infrastructure globally. Some years ago the company started the so-called “Jasmin Certified Studios” program, which means that studios joining the program will work exclusively for LJ and receive various benefits from the platform in exchange. These benefits include personal account managers, additional information and analysis that help studios gain more profit on the sites, and higher ranking and visibility of models on the site. Currently there are over ten Jasmin Certified Studios in Romania, one in Budapest, and more in Russia and Colombia. While the company promotes the benefits of working in studios, at the same time it sanctions independent models. There were significant changes in the ranking and payout model in 2020 in that regard, which were strongly criticized by models. However, the company responded to models’ criticism by deleting their accounts for merely liking a negative post about LJ. In this case, discriminating models’ interests versus studios’ took an extreme form in LJ’s policies.

Studios take a significant percentage (35–50%, based on forum discussions) of models’ payment. Thus, after the platform takes its share, models working in studios often end up only with 10–20% of the money paid by customers for their show. However, while the majority of models based in the global core are able to work from their own homes, studios in some cases are the only means for accessing the industry for models on the semi-periphery and periphery. As somebody pointed out on a Hungarian chat forum, illustrating the typical multi-generational living conditions on the semi-periphery: “I was looking for a studio, because I didn’t want my parents to enter my room while I was playing with a vibrator” (public online Hungarian chat forum, 2017). Additionally, models work in studios to avoid the necessary financial investment when starting camming: “You are likely to lack the equipment and the knowledge, so you would need to invest in it. But why would you spend a lot of money (even if you had it), if you don’t know whether you will earn a lot with this thing or not?” (public online Hungarian chat forum, 2017). Since platforms push all risks to workers in the gig economy, models in more precarious positions, lacking financial resources, are pressured into using the infrastructure of studios. Moreover, there is a growing infrastructure of various business actors which “support” models in initiating and marketing their sites, who also profit from the income paid on the platforms (for instance, several sexcam agencies advertise themselves in Hungary). Thus the money paid by platforms does not simply land on models’ accounts, but rather various intermediary actors take their percentage charge it beforehand, often on top of studios.

Platform staff on the semi-periphery: division of labor within LiveJasmin

LiveJasmin’s platform infrastructure, developers and other staff are based in Hungary and, from 2013, Luxemburg, where Gattyán also established a Docler headquarters. There is, however, a division of labor within Docler: while the Luxemburg team, along with international teams in Budapest, work on IT development and marketing, Hungarian workers continue to make up the departments responsible for content management and customer service. These workers deal directly with the models and the customers, which, as our interview subjects confirmed, involves significantly emotional labor and leaves workers with more psychological damage.

The invisible labor of admin, content manager and customer care staff in a way resembles the somewhat better documented work of the content moderators of social media platforms (see e.g. the documentary The Cleaners, 2018), which also remains in the background and is also outsourced to the semi-periphery and the periphery. In the case of Hungary, such positions at Docler and sexcam studios provided an opportunity for a typically young workforce with good English and/or other foreign language skills, freshly out of tertiary education and facing the threat of unemployment (a workforce later absorbed by SSC companies).  Content and admin staff, besides supervising registrations and transactions, need to monitor several models simultaneously – according to our interview subjects, this could vary from 10–20 to 40–50 screens at a time –, checking that regulations are observed. Thus, the major part of their job is to watch the content of private shows, which is emotionally very demanding – as our informants reported: “As if your work was watching hardcore porn ten hours a day. The things you saw on the screen there, you could never forget” (former female former staff at a small platform company, 2020). However, according to the workers we interviewed, the company did not provide any psychological help for customer service representatives to deal with emotional difficulties resulting from the work.

Maintaining inequalities among sexcam models

The development of digital technology – an area Docler is actively invested and involved in – makes entering the sexcam industry (and the online sex industry in general) easier. At the same time, it also actively contributes to maintaining social inequalities through the inequality of access to this technology. For instance, in order to rank higher on the site, which equals greater visibility and therefore greater opportunities to make money – a certain image quality is desirable, which can be achieved with a good webcam and good internet. Similarly, a bedroom interior design or professional profile photographs  that can be viewed as aesthetically pleasing from the perspective of western customers are also a requirement for higher-ranking models. All of these necessitate initial monetary investment, putting models from poorer backgrounds at a disadvantage, in addition, as mentioned above, to pushing them towards working in studios. Moreover, the appearance of models is also fundamentally tailored to the tastes and expectations of wealthy western customers. As one of our interview subjects observed, while sufficiently “good-looking” models from the US are able to make significantly more income by merely chatting to customers in their underwear, Eastern European models and models from the periphery typically have to perform more extreme sexual acts for less money.

Disciplining models according to this logic is partly performed through human labor – predominantly platform staff located in Hungary, as well as studio staff located in various countries, but predominantly on the semi-periphery and periphery. As one of our informants explained:

Anybody can apply [to become a model], but we were also trying to filter them, though it was really subjective. Well, how do you tell them, why don’t you get dressed properly or wash yourself, you can’t really communicate this. In such cases, we tried to give them a warning, put it in the regulations that we require a certain level of activity or formal expectations, and we had to decide whether they lived up to this or not. […] We tried to nag those who [were not], we were trying to set boundaries … what she is doing, how she shouldn’t be lying there looking bored, but try something, get responding [to customers] […] If this didn’t work, they would get an official warning that if they couldn’t comply, they would be locked out of the program. (former female admin staff at a small platform company, 2020)

In addition to human labor, however, the maintaining of inequalities is performed through algorithmic power and payment ranking (Velthuis and van Doorn 2020). The payout rates on LJ follow a winner-takes-all logic: for an income of 250 USD or less within a payment period, a model gets 30%, while for an income over 30.000 USD, 80%. This highly unequal system contributes to very few models making a lot of money on the platform, while the majority is getting a low payment. Reaching a higher payout rate by attracting enough paying customers requires significant investment from models in terms of time spent on the site and money, since sexcamming is a highly competitive market with over 120.000 models registered only on LJ.  All in all, the algorithm-based system discriminates against models in more precarious situations and having fewer resources when starting camming.

Behind the myth of empowerment through digitalization

While Gattyán promotes digitalization as a means to achieve social development, his company LiveJasmin has in fact greatly contributed to establishing a global industry built on economic and social inequalities and the exploitation of women’s sexual labor. Despite Gattyán’s hypocritical talk in current media appearances of merely running a neutral streaming site where models decide what they want to do, LiveJasmin is a professional and powerful player within the digital sex industry, which has created, and is still actively involved in, building a global infrastructure of various players that all profit from the work of models selling sexual content. Additionally, the platform and other players of the sexcam ecosystem make the most profit on models in precarious positions, working under extremely disadvantageous conditions on the semi-periphery and periphery.

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References

Mathews, Paul Willams (2015): Piece-Rates as Inherently Exploitative: Adult/Asian Cam Models as Illustrative. New Proposals: Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry 7(2): 56–73.

Velthuis, Olav and van Doorn, Niels (2020): Weathering winner-take-all. How rankings constitute competition on webcam sex platforms, and what performers can do about it. In David Stark (Ed.), The Performance Complex: Competitions and Valuations in Social Life, Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 167–185.

Vlase, Ionela and Preoteasa, Ana Maria (2021): Flexi(nse)curity in adult webcamming: Romanian women’s experiences selling digital sex services under platform capitalism. Gender, Place & Culture: 1–32.