ExtasyCams: The Downfall and Its 49 Cents Private Chats
Most of you must be saying that you never heard of ExtasyCams. Well, that is because this camsite was pretty much dead for the last 5+ years.
Also known as chat49, it was a Romanian-based webcam site that had been around since 2005 (yes, they were this old.) The site peaked around 2008, having an average of 100 models online.
Why am I bringing this up? Because on September 1, 2022, BongaCams announced that this deadly cheap camsite is now part of their network. Yet another camsite shutting down and becoming a white label for another camsite.
The trend seems to be like this in the last years, with old camsites not surviving the competition and simply becoming a white label to the most significant bid. The list is already long:
- PrivateFeeds (now Streamate White Label)
- PeekShows (now Flirt 4 Free White Label)
- NeedLive (now LiveJasmin White Label)
- CamWithHer (now CamSoda White Label)
- WebCams.com (now part of MyDirtyHobby’s network)
- LivePimpin (now XLoveCam White Label)
- EuroLive (now BongaCams White Label)
- WebCamClub (now Streamate White Label)
- DirectSex (now Streamate White Label)
- Naked.com (now Flirt 4 Free White Label)
The only exception is iFriends, which ultimately closed down instead of transforming into a white label site as anticipated.
As this list only references camsites with relevant models and captivating content, its compilation would significantly expand if every failed startup in this industry were also considered.
What The Cheapest Camsite Had to Offer?
Let’s have a quick recap of what this old camsite had.
There Was No Concept of Public Chat on ExtasyCams
In order to interact with any model, you would have to pay to join her room. It wouldn’t mean that you were starting a private chat. You were entering her room. Of course, the action could start right there. Getting to know the girl first before paying for a show was impossible.
Free 5-Second Preview
Maybe because of the lack of public chat, ExtasyCams created an option to allow users to not pay for the first 5 seconds in a chat room so they could check what the girl was doing. You would join the room, and a countdown would show how much free time you had left.
Of course, users heavily abused this feature to watch shows for free. They would rejoin the room every 5 seconds and pay nothing. It sounds like an awful way to watch a show, but for freeloaders, this was amazing.
On the other hand, it was super annoying for models to have a guy rejoining her room every 5 seconds (which would send an audio notification to her.) Banning a user would take so many clicks that it was very complicated to ban someone successfully. And the ban would last only 12 hours.
Free credits for all new accounts
They would automatically give every new account between 60 and 180 seconds of private chat. Sounds good, but the implementation was terrible. They wouldn’t verify accounts, so you could easily create new accounts using a different email address and claim 60-180 seconds more.
As you can imagine, people were abusing this. They never did anything to stop it. Even worse, they once had the idea of giving more free credits to all inactive users. Out of nowhere, I got 180 seconds credited to my abandoned account.
49 Cents Per Minute, The Cheapest Cam Shows You could find
If you purchase ExtasyCams’ biggest credit package, you will actually pay just 49 cents per minute in private chat. The other options were 59, 69, and 99 cents. Even with the “expensive” packages, you would still pay less than on any other camsite. The lowest you could find on other camsites would be 98 cents, and that was in specific situations. For example, new models on LiveJasmin had to set 98 cents per minute until they reached a minimum of online hours. Or some special event on ImLive that would allow models to set 99 cents per minute. Those situations were not the norm.
But cheap private chats were the norm on ExtasyCams.
The Biggest Problem of Cheap Cam Shows
Do you know what the problem was with this? Models were not performing shows at all. I can’t blame them. After all, they were getting merely 20%. That means that one minute in private would be $0.098 in their pockets! As pointed out by WeCamgirls, it could be $0.20 per minute, but that would be in the case the member was paying $0.99 per minute.
By the way, 20 percent would be if the model wasn’t working for a studio. She would get the full amount. Otherwise, she would need to split that with the studio, leaving her with a few coins in her pocket.
Even if the member were in private for half an hour, which seems a decent amount of time to chat before getting down to business, the model would make less than $3. You can’t expect anyone to perform a show of any level for just 9 cents per minute.
Cheap Camsites Are For Cross-Shows
Most models, if not all, would use ExtasyCams as a secondary camsite while streaming on the main camsite. If the model performed any explicit show, you could bet it was for a private chat on another camsite. They wouldn’t reply to you. Why would they shift their attention from a member giving them $2-$3 to someone giving $0.09? You could still watch the show paying a meager price. No matter how much you paid for the credits, one minute on ExtasyCams would be cheaper than paying to peek on LiveJasmin, which is $1.99 for just 30 seconds.
You could still talk to some of them, though. Some girls would talk to you if they were not performing a show on another site or chatting with a potential paying member. Mainly the ones not getting any private sessions. They were bored of doing nothing. Talking with anyone was a relief for them, a way to break the boredom. Of course, you would have to take money out of your pocket. After all, there was no free chat on ExtasyCams.
The Day The Cheapest Camsite Were Hacked
I consider this the turning point for them. It was 2009. I went to check the site, and the whole site had been replaced by a message from some hacked self-titled “NobodyCoder.” I think he just found a back door and placed his default copy-and-paste message. It had nothing to do with the site itself.
Somehow, it took weeks for them to fix it. They removed the message as soon as possible. But the site continued down for weeks.
They came back with a new and better design. Slowly, most models started coming back. But they ended up losing many models. After all, the models had no idea if and when the site would be back online. They couldn’t just sit and wait to see when they could work again. So, the models/studios just ditched ExtasyCams.
Two years later, in 2011, they got hacked again. I didn’t see the actual thing. But people were commenting that the site was hacked. It was indeed down for maintenance for some days. It is not a good sign when a site that was supposedly fully revamped two years ago goes through another significant update that requires being down for days.
But ExtasyCams Lived a Long Life
Honestly, I am surprised that ExtasyCams managed to stay in business for so long. I agree that the business idea was good. After all, a lot of people look for cheap cam shows. The implementation was not the best.
Giving free credits so easily was a big mistake. Why give free private time if you already offer the lowest price in the business? And I am pretty sure that models were not seeing a dime for the free time people were getting—quite a stupid move. You don’t motivate the models, which in turn won’t perform good shows or not perform at all. Then, members will complain.
Having such low prices ended up being a problem. Models were getting almost nothing for their time. In return, they would not give a flying fuck about members. There are even reports of models not being paid. It never goes well for a camsite when they don’t pay the people who are their business’s essence. On the other hand, members would be angry and quickly realize that the cheapest camsite ever was useless and a waste of time.
On top of that, support was null. You would speak into the void if you tried to talk to them. Nobody has ever replied to me. Indeed, I rarely contacted them. However, I reported to them a bug that was affecting their free credit system in a way that they could potentially lose money. They never replied and never fixed it.
And to make things worse, they got hacked twice. Yet, they lived for sixteen years.
What Happens to ExtasyCams Models?
Considering their few models and how they usually cared about them, I’d say they were in the dark. Probably, they didn’t get any warning or option to move on to BongaCams.
All profiles are gone, and you will have difficulty finding the girls. That is why CWSW is a crucial tool. If you want to know where your favorite camgirl is now, CWSW is your best option. You can filter by camsite and see all models from ExtasyCams.
I admit this isn’t perfect, and you won’t find every model there. Extasy wasn’t such ecstasy as the name implies, and it was far from being popular among MyCamgirl users.
What Now?
Well, they are now a White Label for BongaCams. It is unknown if they just joined BongaCams’ affiliate program and turned the domain into a WL. Or if it was BongaCams who bought the domain name.
But assuming that BongaCams itself sent emails announcing that “a popular webcam site has joined BongaCams!” At this point, I wouldn’t call ExtasyCams a popular webcam site. It had one of the lowest traffic of all sites, and after the death of LivePimpin, it was the site with the least number of online models.
I think they were so excited that they even typed the site’s name wrong: ExtyCams instead of ExtasyCams.
Anyway, it was the first time a camsite announced another camsite “joining” them. Extasy didn’t join them. They just pointed the domain to their white-label system.
