Within public chat rooms the audience can see tips and viewer comments as scrolling text which appears next to the real-time video stream.
Camgirls will frequently read and respond to the scrolling viewer comments.
However this is not the first time that conversational interaction had become a boon for the erotic entertainment industry.
The Mitchell Brothers O'Farrell Theatre strip club is credited with the invention of the lap dance when during 1977 their new stage, New York Live, pioneered customer-contact shows with strippers that came off the stage and sat in the laps of customers for tips.
The websites provide the transactional platform, and then collects and distributes a percentage of the tips to the models.
For public chat rooms, the model's portion of a tip is a little less than half.
The camera captured Ringley doing almost everything – brushing her teeth, doing her laundry, doing stripteases – and then she broadcast it live over the Internet.
Additionally, the pornographic film industry used to be male-dominated except for the performers.
In private chat rooms, viewers pay by the minute for a private show.
However in free chat rooms payment is voluntary and is in the form of tips, thus providing the model with an income at a minimal cost for the multiple viewers of her chat room's video stream.
Much of the success of camming owes to its ability to move beyond the borders of erotic video performance, and into the everyday social lives of camming customers, or fans as they are known.
Webcam performers are often highly entrepreneurial, and use mainstream social networking sites such as Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Skype, and Tumblr to build and maintain relationships with their customers.