Quick Summary:

Value: 4/5 Design: 4/5 Quality: 5/5

• About 25,000 performers on the site, with about 500-1000 available at any given time
• Nice, straightforward, and relatively clean design and layout
• Some of the models get stroppy when you ask them to do unusual stuff!
• Unless you’re spending a LOT of time and money on the site, the upgrade features (premium membership and joining fanclubs) aren’t worth it.

The Full Story:

One thing I’ve noticed with the adult dating sites I’ve been reviewing lately is that the most popular upsell on such sites are webcams. Makes sense, right? You have a membership largely consisting of horny single guys desperate for female attention and you try to sell them cyberhookers.

Reflecting on this, I thought it’d be a good idea to do a review of a cam site, to give you guys some idea of what you can expect should you sign up to one. I decided to start with cams.com as we get a discount there on credits (it’s one of the 12983491764 sites AFF own) but I have some plans lined up to review a few other non-AFF camsites later on, too.

Anyhoo, rocking on. Here’s what the home page of the cams.com looks like. As you can see, the design is a lot cleaner than some of AFF’s other sites. That’s at least partially reflective of the more straightforward nature of the site’s offerings, which are:

1) Camgirls doing and saying stuff that you ask them to for money
2) Watching prerecorded camgirl shows
3) That’s it? Am I missing anything?

Like most similar sites, cams.com offers a free “teaser” camgirl chat to people. You just have to supply them with your email address and confirm it (expect to receive some follow-up marketing emails). Also be aware when you’re chatting to models that the girls can see how much credit you have in your account and whether or not you belong to her “fan club” (it costs extra to join a girl’s fan club, but you receive a discount on her private shows – full details in this image.) Additionally, if you buy more than 30 minutes worth of private shows over the course of a month, you get free access to a girl’s fan club, or an extra month on one you already belong to.

Cams.com also has a “premiere” account–basically a “gold member” type deal that provides further discounts on shows and allows you to have email contact with the models. You can see a screenshot of the signup page for that listing the features and benefits here. My call would be that unless you get REALLY hooked on cams in general or a particular camgirl specifically, the upsell options aren’t worth the cash you’d save.

Well, enough about the options and mechanics. Time to answer the questions you’re really asking.

Are the girls hot?

Well, yeah. I mean, for any definition of “hot” you might subscribe to, with 25,000 models on the site and about 500-1000 available at any given time, if you can’t find one you think is attractive the problem is probably not with the site.

Are the prerecorded shows any good?

I had a look at the top-rated video show at the time of the review, this one here. This is what it looked like in full-screen resolution. The girl was certainly very attractive (face and body), as well as being, uh, eager to please (she accidentally the whole dildo!) I did find the sound a bit jerky, but that may just have been my connection, as the video was streaming (Flash).

I noticed that her accent was Eastern European, something you’ll find with a lot of the camgirls for reasons beyond the scope of this review. Which brings me to a point that might be worth making – a lot of the models will have limited English, even if they SAY they speak it. If this matters to you (and keeping it real – it probably doesn’t) be sure to check out their profiles before paying for a show; they’ll usually give you an idea of where the model is from, which should inform your expectations.

Another thing about the prerecorded shows is that there’s no option to save them, and paying to see one only gives you a single streamed viewing. If you want to record them yourself to re-watch at your leisure you’ll have to find a 3rd party solution–perhaps a browser plugin or standalone session-recording application.

When you ask them to jump, do they say “how high?

Some of the models are picky about what they’ll do or not do on camera. It’s pretty common for them to refuse anal, DP, watersports, etcetera, or to charge a premium for such services. For example, the girl in the prerecorded show mentioned above states that there’s certain acts she’ll only perform for guys who join her fan club. To get a feel for how generally complicit the models are on the site, I thought I’d masquerade as a guy with a slightly unusual fetish and see how many of them I could get to go along with it.

I figured I wouldn’t choose anything too bizarre or disgusting. I settled on just asking to see the performer place a shoe on her head. At $2 a minute, it doesn’t seem like some big huge thing to ask for, right? WRONG. I got turned down by FOUR girls consecutively until this BBW angel gave me what I was asking for. Very disappointing. And what reasons did they give for turning down my entirely reasonable request?

1) Aliciasforms figured she could do better out of one of the other guys pestering her (reasonable?)
2) The inappropriately-named MistressKinks decided playing with her hair and ignoring me was way more awesome than getting paid.
3) Morticia decided she was too much of a big bad dominatrix to do anything so demeaning as putting a shoe on her head. Though she at least had the good grace to laugh hysterically when I asked her if she would.
4) Oxygen thought she could do better out of one of the other guys (reasonable redux?)

Parting shots

So what was my overall impression of cams.com? You get what you pay for. And make no mistake: you will pay. Cams aren’t cheap, and it’s easy to blow a lot of cash very quickly. But if you’re responsible with your spending it’s certainly a cut or seven above the usual “jerking it to a porn movie” Friday night finger-shuffle.

Even if some of the performers are less than accommodating of poor, beleaguered, shoe-on-head-loving fools.