Cam Girl Diaries Podcast – Episode 91

Samantha 38G: 27 Years of Camming, Sales & Changing the Industry

Host: Gary Gabagool
Guest: Samantha 38G

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Gary: All right, welcome to the Cam Girl Diaries Podcast, the podcast where real cam girls share real stories, real strategies, and the truth behind the industry. No filters, no fluff.

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Let’s get into it.

Today we have the BBW goddess and the undisputed, undefeated Queen of Cocks, Samantha 38G.

Samantha: I don’t know about that.

Gary: Camming, yes. The Queen of Cocks.

Samantha: A lot of my fans will agree with you when it comes to cocks. One told me I was probably the Martha Stewart of cocks the other day.

Gary: Why?

Samantha: Because I said, “I can’t grow plants, but I can grow a hard-on.”

Gary: Nice. I mean, not for me.

Some of your customers have been with you your entire career. When you say “entire career,” you’re talking like 20 years?

Samantha: I’m talking 27 years.

Gary: Twenty-seven?

Samantha: Twenty-seven. That wasn’t heard of when I started in this industry. For a girl to have a career over the age of 24 was practically unheard of.

Gary: Yeah. I mean, back then, 27 years ago… I’m not good at math. That’s like ’99?

Samantha: Yeah. I started in the year 2000. 1999, 2000 is when I started shooting.

My first scene went viral, and I’ve been viral several times since then. My very first scene for Big Naturals went viral.

Gary: Big Naturals. Was that during the early internet days?

Samantha: Oh yeah.

Gary: Was that even before high-speed internet?

Samantha: Oh yeah. It was dial-up back then.

Gary: How did that even work?

Samantha: I don’t know!

I think Reality Kings took a chance on me. They contacted me and hired me. I had just shot for the Score Group and gotten my first magazine cover, although the cover hadn’t even come out yet.

Then I shot for Reality Kings. They were a Miami company, and Los Angeles had a very specific look back then: fake tits, blonde hair, skinny girls, all under the age of 24.

It was basically catch and release. They’d use the girls, shoot a bunch of scenes with them, and then move on. That was the industry standard back then.

I was very different.

Reality Kings and Bang Bros were connected, and it was actually the same guy signing my checks. That’s how OG I am.

Gary: That’s pretty damn OG.

Samantha: My first scene went viral, and my first magazine cover came out. The Score Group put me on the cover even though they thought I was fatter than I should be.

My stuff went viral, although I didn’t find that out for five or six years because I lived in my own little bubble.

I shot for the Score Group for 17 years, which is unheard of for a model of any size or type to shoot for one company for that long.

I won Plumper of the Year so many times that they named me Plumper of the Decade. Then I kept winning.

Gary: You’re like royalty.

Samantha: And then I became Plumper of the Century.

Gary: So you went from decades to century?

Samantha: Yep.

Until this day, I am still the most-shot BBW in the history of this industry, and I haven’t shot a professional scene in over seven years.

Gary: Damn. And the last seven years have basically been the height of social media. You get that, right?

Samantha: Yeah.

Then I signed up with I’mLive, which was the first cam company I worked for.

Gary: I’ve heard of them.

Samantha: They had horrible contracts back then. They had to make an exception for me because of my size and my age.

They had just started a porn star page. Tara Patrick was number 15, Ron Jeremy was number 16, and I was the 17th porn star they signed up.

Gary: Holy shit.

Samantha: I found all kinds of problems with their coding, which was frustrating. But I was the 17th porn star to sign up for camming.

And back then, camming was considered shameful. Porn stars didn’t do that.

Gary: Really?

Samantha: Yeah. It wasn’t considered respectable at the time.

Tara recently retired from camming, and her last cam site was Streamate.

Gary: Holy shit. So you outlasted her.

Samantha: I think the only woman who’s probably been camming as long as I have is Taylor Stevens. She was a BBW and Score model, then she became super skinny, and she’s one of the top girls on Streamate.

I actually signed her up.

I got my start on I’mLive, and then I got fired.

Gary: Fired? What did you do?

Samantha: I wouldn’t leave their coding problems alone. I kept saying, “Y’all have to fix this. You have to fix this. You have to fix this.”

They didn’t like being called out for it, so they fired me.

Then I went to the XBIZ forums, specifically the women’s section. I was there with all the women in affiliate marketing, and the head of affiliates for I’mLive was there.

She asked me, “Why’d you quit?”

I said, “Y’all fired me, Carolyn. Y’all fired me.”

And all the affiliates went, “What?”

“You make us the most money!”

It was all about ego. I made them the most money.

They tried to get me back, but I’d already moved on.

By the time that happened, I’d gone back to shooting for Reality Kings and Big Naturals, and they’d signed me up to their new site, Naked.

I signed with Naked for a higher percentage than what they were paying everybody else. I renegotiated the contract and got a higher percentage than the industry standard at the time.

Gary: When the head guy from Reality Kings recruits you, I guess you have some bargaining position.

Samantha: Right.

Cam contracts can be negotiated. That wasn’t the first contract I negotiated, and it wasn’t the last.

If you’re a top girl who sells, you have the power to renegotiate your contract.

Gary: You’ve got to have some leverage.

Samantha: Exactly. I’m always thinking about leverage.

I’ve gotten Bang Bros to change their contract. I’ve gotten the Score Group to change their contract for me when I was told it wasn’t possible.

And I’m like, “It was so easy, it wasn’t even funny.”

Gary: But back then, didn’t you almost set a precedent? You were one of the first girls coming up, so popularity gave you leverage.

Samantha: Right. I was making these companies a lot of money from my scenes.

They don’t keep hiring you if you don’t convert to sales. That’s rule number one in every business: sales.

Rule number two is, number one can do whatever the fuck they want.

That’s something you always have to keep in mind.

After I left, I signed up with MyFreeCams.

Gary: Not Naked?

Samantha: MyFreeCams.

Back then, cam sites were very ageist. They didn’t hire women over 37 or 35.

I was 42 when I went to MyFreeCams.

Leo, God rest his soul, who also owned OnlyFans, had to give the okay to allow me to cam there as an older BBW.

That opened things up and helped allow women over the age of 35 to cam.

Gary: Interesting.

Even back in the day, how long were porn magazines around? Were there older magazines for mature women?

Samantha: It was rare.

And you also have to know, I’m a magazine girl.

I’m one of the most-shot magazine girls in the industry. I’m in over 200 magazines and have over 25 magazine covers.

There have been times when I’ve walked into a store and my tits were on one magazine and my ass was on another.

Gary: That had to be nice.

Samantha: I didn’t walk into the store. My ex did.

He’s like, “I don’t want to look at boobies. I don’t want to see my ex.”

So he goes and looks at the ass magazines, and there was my ass.

He’s like, “I can’t get away from you.”

Gary: Yeah, that’s gonna suck.

Samantha: That’s the thing about camming. You grow your brand. You grow your customer base. You get to where you convert.

The higher you convert, the more money you can make. The more money you make while you’re online, the more affiliates become interested.

There’s a third component that a lot of girls aren’t aware of: the affiliate market.

Nobody really talks about that.

Say a cam site is mad at you and moves you down to the bottom of the fifth page because you said something that upset them.

You can text your affiliates and say, “Hi, baby. Do you need some pictures to promote me?”

Then you’re right back at the top of the first page within 30 minutes to an hour because they’re sending traffic.

You convert that traffic into sales, so you’re making their money and you’re making your money. The algorithm is going to put you at a higher placement based on how much money you’re making.

I’ve made friends with affiliates. I’ve recruited new affiliates. I’ve taken fans and turned them into affiliates who are now high up in that market.

I don’t believe in “no.” I believe in workarounds to get what you want.

Gary: That makes sense. You get to go to XBIZ, get to know the affiliates, and make friends with those affiliates.

Samantha: Exactly.

Gary: So what you’re saying is networking.

Samantha: You have to network.

Back then, I networked on XBIZ forums, MySpace, and Twitter. You network with people who are in the industry and the people behind the scenes.

Three different people have done me several favors over the years.

Gary: Yeah. I know I spanked really hard after CamCon and showed up.

Samantha: I have a big mouth.

Gary: It seems that way.

How do you get fired from all these places?

Samantha: So there was a final board session or discussion that I was supposed to be part of. They didn’t think anybody was going to show up because everybody was tired.

Well, a whole bunch of cam models came in and said, “We’re here for Sam.”

They had canceled the session, so they had to call back all the other panelists.

There were people from the cam sites giving advice about camming, and I’m looking at them thinking, “None of them have ever been on cam.”

How are you going to tell people how to cam when you’ve never cammed yourself? You don’t know what they’re experiencing.

So I let them talk. I let them give the same dead-ass lines that weren’t useful.

Then I came through and I gave people real advice that actually works.

Pretty soon, even the other people on the panels were taking notes.

Gary: Yeah, that makes sense.

That’s a problem I’ve noticed on YouTube. There are all these guys who try to do OnlyFans management.

Samantha: Yes. I watch them.

That shit pisses me off so bad.

You’ve got to know your enemy, and you’ve got to know how they think. Some of their tactics may work for you.

I’m not going to say it’s always bad to know what other people are thinking and doing. That way, you can plan accordingly and find workarounds.

That’s why I was on the XBIZ forums. That’s why I read GFY.

You’ve got to know what your enemy is thinking and doing.

Gary: When you say “enemy,” who’s your enemy?

Samantha: When I started, it was frequently the people behind the scenes at the cam sites.

Affiliates called us all “lazy whores who do nothing.”

I’m like, “That’s hilarious. Obviously, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

They also said we were replaceable.

That was the industry standard for porn stars, too. At every porn shoot, you’d get the lecture that we’re all replaceable and that we charge too much.

It was the same attitude behind the scenes at these cam companies.

I thought, “Well, maybe you’re just bad at hiring.”

Because if I’m a manager and everybody I hire doesn’t work, that says something about my management skills.

Gary: That’s a fact.

Samantha: At the time, there was one industry board that was bigger than all the others, and it was made up of cam girls.

Gary: I don’t remember that.

Samantha: It was called StripperWeb.

Gary: What exactly was it?

Samantha: An industry board for all of us to get together and share tips about what worked, what didn’t, and our problems with cam sites and new sites.

It was 100,000 strong and 99.9 percent women.

Cam sites were terrified of us because 100,000 women could point out everything they were doing wrong.

There were also other industry forums where people were trashing us.

I copied the link where they were trashing us and posted it on our board.

I said, “This is what the people behind the scenes at these cam companies think about us. This is how the industry thinks of us.”

They saw it and basically said, “Oh shit. They know what we’re saying.”

And that was the end of it. They stopped saying that stuff about us.

Gary: That’s a lot of women.

Samantha: Yeah. A hundred thousand.

You’d go to other industry boards and find a few hundred people. This was 100,000.

Gary: So you guys had the power.

Samantha: We had the power. I made sure we had the power.

I got into everybody’s minds about how these cam sites operate.

We’re their partners. We’re not disposable.

One site pissed me off, so I took their top 10 girls and had them go work on another cam site.

All of a sudden, their bottom line went to shit.

When you affect their bottom line by 20 percent, all of a sudden you’re not so replaceable.

The cam sites learned to have much more respect for us across the board.

Gary: So, in essence, what I’m hearing is you were basically a cam girl pimp?

Samantha: No. Not in the typical sense of beating bitches.

Gary: You had your crew.

Samantha: I didn’t have a crew.

I looked out for them.

When one of us thrives, we all thrive. When one of us grows, we all grow.

The industry changes.

Now performers are making the majority of the money instead of the company.

It wasn’t one person making a profit while everybody else was making 35 percent. One cam site even tried to take it down to 25 percent.

I said, “Oh, fuck you. Watch this shit.”

Then they begged me to come back. I mean begged. The president called me up and begged.

Of course, I also shut down their servers a couple of times when I got my tits out.

Gary: They must be some nice tits.

Samantha: But I wanted to change the industry so that performers were more of a partner, that we had more respect in the industry, and that we made the majority of the money instead of some guy at the top who hated us.

And I did that.

I accomplished that.

Now we’re all more entrepreneurial.

Gary: I never thought about that, the early beginnings of the webcam industry.

They had to be completely in control. They basically said, “This is where you go.”

Samantha: You couldn’t work for more than one company.

If you worked for one company and quit or got fired, you couldn’t work for another company for six months to a year.

They all abided by that.

They all paid out around 35 percent and did chargebacks, so you didn’t know how much your check was going to be until you got it.

They could take six months of chargebacks out all at once, and you could get nothing.

You’d think, “I’ve made enough money to cover my bills.”

Then you get your check and it’s a quarter of what you expected.

There was nothing you could do about it, and you couldn’t quit and go to another cam site.

It was fucked up.

If you signed up through a recruiter or agent, they basically owned you, and you couldn’t get out from underneath them.

If the agent decided not to pay your part of the money, that was fine. The cam companies always sided with them.

It was very predatory.

Gary: Yeah, very much so.

That actually makes me think of the Lightspeed Girls in the early 2000s.

Samantha: I don’t know them.

Gary: They did soft porn. Jordan Capri, for instance, was one of the biggest names. They owned the name Jordan Capri. They owned everything.

The website is still up. It’s been up for more than 20 years.

Samantha: I can give you another example. Flower signed an exclusive contract with Reality Kings for her website, and she had to sue for her own name and lost.

Gary: That’s exactly like the Lightspeed Girls. It’s like wrestling or WWE.

Samantha: Completely.

When I signed cam contracts and stuff, I always had a lawyer.

They would look over the contracts and say, “This is worse than the music industry.”

All the porn companies came from a very predatory business model back then, and I helped change a lot of that.

Before I started, I bought my name.

Usually, when you shoot for a company, you come up with the name and they use it, but they own it. They wouldn’t register the domain for you. They owned it, and you had to come up with a different name.

I already owned my name.

So they had to call me Samantha Anderson, Samantha 38G, Samantha Smith, or something else.

People would say, “Why were you always changing your name?”

I’d say, “No, I never changed my name. They just couldn’t own it.”

Gary: They just couldn’t own it.

You had the foresight to see that.

Samantha: I was 30 years old when I got into the industry, and I came from a business background.

I was already an average girl to begin with.

Gary: You’re 57 now, right?

Samantha: I just turned 57 last month.

Gary: And you’ve been in the cam game this long. You don’t look it.

You’d think someone who’s been in the cam game this long would look beat down.

Samantha: At one time, I was very frustrated and very unhappy in the industry.

Then I realized I can’t change men, but I can change how I react to men.

All of a sudden, I got much happier because I don’t tolerate anything I don’t have to.

As a woman in the industry, especially in the beginning, you’re always told to be nice no matter what. Tolerate whatever they want, no matter what.

Gary: That’s not you.

Samantha: No.

Cam sites used to try to fine us for not being nice, no matter how mean the guy was.

I said, “Let me tell you something, honey. You can’t fine me. That’s against U.S. labor laws.”

They’d say, “But we’re based out of Cyprus. Labor laws don’t apply to us.”

I said, “If you want to do business in the United States, make money and have performers out of the United States, you have to obey U.S. labor laws. Shall I take it up with the U.S. Labor Board?”

I told them, “Fine me. Let’s see how that goes.”

Because you can’t fine people and take all their money so they don’t get their check.

All of a sudden, I wasn’t being fined anymore.

They tried to do it again, and I said, “Oh no. I know U.S. labor laws. Let’s go. Let’s see how it goes for you.”

Gary: Especially in the adult industry, they obviously look down on it.

Samantha: You have to be willing to take the hits, too.

I took hits financially. I took hits career-wise. I was more than willing to do that.

I found ways around things.

You’re going to take a hit sometimes. You have to be willing to take the hits.

If they throw you to the bottom of the fifth page, then it’s just a challenge.

I’m a happy person. I don’t tolerate anything I don’t have to.

Gary: Obviously, streaming was innovative in that way. You don’t necessarily have to explain yourself anymore.

So is it obviously way easier now than it was back then?

Do you think cam girls are oversaturated?

Samantha: Definitely.

Gary: Right?

Samantha: Let me know when the world runs out of horny men, and then we’ll talk.

Gary: Good point.

When I think of oversaturation, I’m thinking about girls who are on sites like Chaturbate who just sit there and do nothing.

Samantha: Well, then they’re not going to make money either.

Gary: Should we kick them out?

Samantha: Survival of the fittest.

I’ve been at the top of Chaturbate, although I haven’t worked on there in a long time. I’ve been at the top of the first page.

It’s survival of the fittest, but it’s also a lot of trial and error.

What worked yesterday may not work today.

What worked ten years ago might not work now.

You have to adapt.

You have to be smart enough to adapt. You have to come up with different business plans to adapt.

You have to study the industry, and you have to study your own business and what works for you and what doesn’t.

Gary: That’s true.

Everyone’s different.

Samantha: It’s like a sales, commission-based job. If you don’t make the sale, you don’t make money.

Sales is the one thing I tell people: it’s a sales job.

And if you’re bad at sales…

I can talk anyone’s head off. I can be funny. I can be sassy. I can be sexy. I can be bossy.

But I’m good at sales.

I’ve been making money off my boobies since I was 20 years old because I started off being a stripper, and I always held a regular office job at the same time.

Gary: So you were an office girl by day, stripper by night?

Samantha: Yep.

Or a sales girl at a clothing store or something.

I always kept two jobs.

So now, having multiple jobs, like being an OnlyFans girl, being a cam girl, this or that… Why aren’t y’all hustling 20 ways?

Gary: So is that how you look at cam sites? You basically think of it as sales?

Samantha: It’s a sales job.

You’re getting men to convert to sales. The more money you make, the higher your placement, because they want to reward the girls who convert into sales.

They want to send traffic to the girls who make them money.

Sales is number one in every business.

Without sales, you do not have a business.

Gary: That’s true.

How do you think about showing your body versus personality? How do those two fit together?

Samantha: There’s a Mae West quote about personality being the thing that rises above the crowd and goes out into the dark of the night.

It’s all personality.

You can be the beautiful private girl, but if you just sit there twirling your thumbs and texting on your phone and you’re boring, there’s nothing worse than being boring.

I’ve seen extremely… I’ve seen 65-year-olds at the top of the first page.

Those women were saying things that made me think, “I want to give them my money.”

They were 65. The lighting wasn’t the best, but their talk game was on point.

I was thinking, “Damn, what would I ever think of to say that?”

Without personality, you don’t have that connection. You have to give someone something else to connect to.

I have a leg up because I’ve had such a long career.

I’ve had guys come into my cams whom I’ve known since I was a stripper.

Sometimes guys who I first started camming with on I’mLive will come find me again.

Gary: Jesus Christ. They’re probably retired by now.

Samantha: They’re like, “Oh, I know her. The boobs are still the same, and she keeps getting prettier, so what the hell?”

I think I’ve tricked the devil.

But if you’re happy, it glows. It shows.

I’m a happy person, and I’m happy with my job in this industry.

Whatever obstacles come up, I think of them as a fun challenge to overcome.

A lot of the time, it’s easier than I ever thought it would be to overcome those obstacles.

Gary: Right.

At this point, what would you say to new girls who are just coming into the game?

Samantha: Sales.

Study sales.

There are 20 million YouTube videos on sales and sales funnels. It doesn’t matter what industry they’re in. Something is applicable to you because sales is a skill you can develop.

And you have to be entertaining.

When I see newbies go, “Can I sit there and watch TV while I cam?”

I’m like, “What?”

If I’m bored, then they’re bored.

It’s your job to entertain them.