If not, performers could end up with a spreadsheet filled with names and payment information - a nightmare to handle on top of their day job. Some performers also promote their Snapchat premium accounts prominently on their other social media, but this can be risky if the wrong person stumbles on it. "There is a huge over saturation of models who are very new taking payments through sites like PayPal, Square, and Venmo, and while I wish all performers could make 100 per cent of their money it’s simply not allowed right now," says Saunders. But while some mild nudity may feature on her feed, there is no porn. "Even mainstream and professional porn stars usually have Snapchats as a side hustle to generate extra income and to promote their indie sites," she says. Unlike traditional adult films, webcam porn allows camgirls to interact directly (and intimately!) with their fans.



Your webcam will be made public to the entire site unless you put a password on your chat room. The kind of niche you might find might suit your own personality or body type such as dominatrix or BBW and it may pay to specialize on a fetish sexy cam porn site rather than one of the mainstream platforms. Aerie Saunders, a pornstar and Sexy Cam Porn girl, estimates that up to 90 per cent of those in the adult industry currently run an unofficial premium Snapchat service or have done in the past. Premium Snapchat might sound like an elite tier for the photo-sharing app's most vociferous users, but really it's something that the firm isn't so keen to shout about. But adult entertainers aren’t the only ones using premium Snapchat. And although premium Snapchat is technically against the social network's terms of use, given that all the content is private it's difficult for the firm to censor it - unlike other platforms like Instagram where content that contravenes guidelines is often swiftly expunged.



For example, Tea sells her premium Snapchat through MyFreeCams for 550 tokens. Performers' most common forms of payment models for Snapchat content are subscription models or so-called ‘lifetime access’. "I call it the slut tax," says Tea, referring to the refusal of many major payment processors including Stripe, Paypal and Venmo to process transactions relating to the rather amorphous ‘adult industry’. The latter covers one-off payments that let people see content for the foreseeable future, whereas the former is a monthly payment to ‘unlock’ content. "There are lots and lots of people out there that don't like to see a woman monetise her body, or monetise things that they feel entitled to for free, right? The worst thing is that even if you are a woman, the platform still offers you women profiles only; moreover, they say in their Terms and Conditions, that some people are not real members, but bots, or fakes, or employers of the company.



That's the meat of the service for me - one-on-one interaction." She counts approximately 250 interacting members, and around 35 who she messages with on a daily basis. The fact that this use contravenes Snapchat’s terms of service means that Tea is discreet about how she advertises, because the more openly you do so, the more likely it is that you’ll be reported - something that can happen at any time. "In order to stay safe, we have to go through bonafide adult service platforms, which take a large chunk of our earnings," she says. Saunders estimates that the ‘peak’ for Snapchat usage by the adult industry began to tail off as early as 2016. At this time, she says, the buying market was there, and a number of large accounts permitted ‘takeovers’, meaning that an adult performer could build a following solely through the app. People with large followings can be especially vulnerable.