The Pros and Cons to Streaming Through IMs

Independently streaming your webcam shows is not as hard as it may seem. There are both benefits and disadvantages when it comes to choosing not to go through adult cam sites directly and you’ll find most of them below:

The Pros

1. The benefits, or pros as we’ll call them here, include the freedom and less time consuming role you have running through an instant messenger (IM) like Skype, MSN, Yahoo, etc. With adult cam sites, you are usually required to sit in front of the screen at your computer chatting and ‘wooing’ surfers, waiting for someone to bite and buy a private chat. Having your cam set up to work through an IM cuts out the warming-up process, you can decide whether or not to provide a cam preview for him and he pays before he gets the show (either by your own methods or through the adult cam site). Unlike the free cam previews most adult cam sites make you provide, you’ll get to know what the guy wants.
2. Having your clients on your own IM contacts list makes repeat customers easier to recognize and also gives the client a more discreet and convenient way to keep you indexed as he won’t need to bookmark your site to contact you next time he requires your services.
3. Another pro is the cost – it’s free! If you have your own webcam business, the cost of a third party plugin is removed, leaving a lot less overheads and more room to make a profit. This is great especially if you’re just starting out and aren’t sure if you want to pursue this as a career. It’s also simple to integrate into your own site by just creating a separate page to list your IM identities.

The Cons

1. The first con that comes with streaming through any IM account – you will get freeloaders and timewasters who will add you to their account and not even attempt to talk to you. The last thing you want is a big list of contacts with only a few of these being actual paying clients, so it’s best that you decline the contact additions at first and add them individually when you perform on cam for them.
2. Every streaming video, irrelevant of the program running it, can be recorded. Having a video streaming through your IM can enable even a technologically inept person to record your shows if there is a button near the video telling them they can. This is almost impossible to stop, however to deter someone from recording your webcam session, you can watermark the video using Manycam, putting your site URL into the video itself, both preventing him from trying to brand it with a different site and also giving you free advertising if he DOES upload it to a tube site, forum or alike. Splitcam can help in a similar way too, adding his email address or real name into your image or video, exposing his own identity on the recorded footage.
3. Anonymous chat requests can be common (and another con) to running your webcam business through an IM as sometimes guys just want to talk (timewasters). Once you feel you want to get on with business, a subtle hint such as “so what you wanna do now? Horny? :-)” will let him either break the conversation off or ‘upgrade’ to a paid cam show. Try not to let the loquacious guests divert the reason you’re actually talking to them.

While there are pros and cons to having your webcam shows go through an instant messenger, your attitude towards it will help you decide if either of them outweigh the other. But conclusively, it is definitely less time consuming than working through a cam site’s “free chat” system, it is free, easy to use and should definitely be considered as an alternative to running your cam through a site or plugin.

P.S. Thanks to Jasmine for providing a lot of useful info on this subject