Hogue’s lack of complacency is evident in the major changes that his company has undergone in 2010. Recently relaunched as CamWorld.com, Hogue’s website (a long-time leader in webcam erotica) has been given an extensive technological overhaul and added a variety of new features. Hogue’s company plans to introduce a new dating site (iLust) and he intends to continue exploring the BDSM market.
With so many different things going on, Hogue said, his company needed a new brand that would reflect its diversity.
“One day,” Hogue explained, “we were still PrivateCamZ — and the next morning, we were CamWorld. We spent a lot of money on the CamZ brand. We were very proud of the trademark, and I think that PrivateCamZ and HouseCamZ and Amateur CamZ will always be a part of our identity. But we needed to have a brand that would be recognized not just for cams, but for our overall objective — which was to diversify our product and to properly monetize our affiliate traffic.”
With the unveiling of the CamWorld brand and the company’s technological rejuvenation, customers will enjoy high-definition video streaming. Other new features or improvements range from an internal mail system (which allows models and customers to stay in touch via email) to photo-on-demand and video-on-demand enhancements. Customers can now purchase VOD on a per-minute basis, and models now have the ability to create custom videos.
“We’ve certainly noticed that the conversion ratios have dramatically increased because of the way the site is designed,” Hogue asserted. “And the praise we have been getting from the cam girls has been awesome; they love the new features. I even had one girl state that doing all this would embarrass the other cam sites.”
Some people might wonder why, during a major recession, a company would choose to be so ambitious rather than play it safe. But Hogue asserted that in fact, the challenges of a tough economy made it all the more important for him to be ambitious and go that extra mile for customers and models as well as for affiliates. Hogue said that “about a year and a half ago,” he realized that his site needed a technological overhaul; Hogue knew it wouldn’t be easy, but he also knew that it had to be done.
“The old technology that we were running on—our old scripting—was tired and limited in its expandability and its ability to diversify,” Hogue recalled. “We knew that our scripting needed to be addressed if we were to keep moving forward. So we put a lot of time and effort into pretty much all aspects of the cam script itself. In my opinion, this is the best performerbased cam script out there because it has so many options for performers.”
And with the arrival of the DateCamCash program, Hogue added, affiliates also have a lot to be excited about. “In this economy,” he said, “we have to be able to monetize our data more efficiently — not only for ourselves, but for our affiliates as well, so that more money can be made on the traffic.”
Another thing Hogue is enthusiastic about is his company’s increasing involvement in the fetish/BDSM side of the webcam market. Earlier this year, Hogue announced that he had formed a BDSM-oriented partnership with Clips4Sale. “We’re very excited about our fetish cams,” Hogue said. “We’re working closely with Clips4Sale, especially now that we’ve launched our new back end. Clips4Sale has a wealth of fetish customers and performers, which is what attracted us to them.”
Hogue added that in BDSM, credibility is everything — and joining forces with Clips4Sale, he said, sends out a message that CamWorld is quite serious about BDSM erotica. “The hardcore fetish customers can easily spot a fake, which is why it’s important to have fetish performers who are really into the fetish lifestyle and are really into the fetish community,” Hogue stressed. “Customers who are really into the fetish lifestyle are willing to pay for it. Look at the clothes; it’s not an inexpensive sport. The quality fetish clothes that they require in that lifestyle are very high-end.”
Hogue went on to say that fans of webcam erotica — either kinky or vanilla — can be very loyal customers because they tend to develop emotional connections to the models. Interactivity, Hogue believes, is the wave of the future for the adult Internet — and making CamWorld.com as interactive as possible, he said, was a crucial part of revamping his company.
Hogue noted: “There are all kinds of reasons why people will go to live cam, whether it’s therapeutic for them — they can tell the cam girl anything they want because they have the anonymity — or whether they live in small towns, where they can’t really go out and express their fantasies. Even if they live in small towns, they have the freedom to express their fantasies at home online and have someone respond directly to them. Certainly, the interactive ability is appealing to them, and they’re willing to pay for that ability.”
Looking back on his 12 years in the adult industry, Hogue pointed out that many of the Internet companies that were doing really well a decade ago have since gone out of business. Many of them, he suspects, were unable or unwilling to change with the times. But Hogue is determined to avoid that fate and the unveiling of CamWorld.com, he said, underscores his belief that a desire to keep evolving is a crucial part of staying in business.
“I’m very excited,” Hogue asserts. “We have a lot invested in this expansion and my crew has put a lot of time and effort into making this happen. I look forward to the challenges ahead.”
