Stripchat today released its end of the year data report for 2020 and good-golly is it packed full of more information than you could ever want to know about the live camming business.
For example, who among us would have guessed that the cam-modelling industry had such a huge userbase. Per the report:
Stripchat reports an overall growth in traffic in 2020 having 906,181,416 in total new users vs 537,938,778 in 2019.
That’s nearly a billion new users after a year in which the platform saw more than half-a-billion. We’re talking about an industry that’s pandemic-proof. (And for good reason, there’s no safer sex than cam sex).
However, despite Salt-N-Peppa’s best attempts, we’re not here to talk about sex. We’re here to talk about AI and what Stripchat calls the “the next best use case for AI.”
The 💜 of EU tech
The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!
[Read: Why AI is the future of home security]
Called “Anal-ytics,” it’s… well, here’s what Stripchat says:
Our team has developed a machine-learning algorithm to identify particular sex acts within the live-streaming video. We’ve called our AI “Anal-ytics” and it analyzes live video as it happens, allowing us to bring live anal and live blowjob scenes happening at the very moment right to the eyes and hands of our users. In 2020 the total traffic to both categories approximately doubled.
It sounds a lot like Stripchat developed a computer vision model capable of searching through the hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of live streams happening on its platform in real-time for specific model interactions. The system, we assume, then surfaces those results to a “featured” section on the main page — or something like that, admittedly I haven’t interacted with the site itself outside of due diligence for this article.
Quick take: This is genius. A decade ago when the cam industry was really starting to gain steam on the back of quicker home internet connections the idea of this particular use case would have seemed far-fetched. But AI’s come a long way. Modern deep learning techniques make it possible for businesses to search through huge mountains of data that would take a staff of humans thousands of years to parse.
In case you’re wondering how that surge of users turned out for the models, Stripchat reports the top five earners made between $388 and $965 an hour. The site also said:
Users spent 98,595,157 hours on live cams in 2020, which is 68% more than they did last year (62,190,458 in 2019). Evidently, it coincides with the traffic growth. It’s also worth mentioning that in 2020 we have a new single tip record, which is $16,897.
This just goes to show you: nothing’s more pandemic-proof than robots and sex.
You can check out the very not-safe-for-work Stripchat website here.
Get the TNW newsletter
Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.