Where the cam buyers actually come from
by Gray Locke, editor at Porneed
I've spent twelve years watching people click out of porn lists. Since July I've been doing it on Porneed, the review site I finally built this summer, and if I had to tell an affiliate one thing it would be this: the person who buys tokens through your link tonight almost never got there by typing a brand name.
It doesn't look that way from outside. In the US, "stripchat" gets around 2.8 million searches a month, while "best cam sites" gets 1,800 (Ahrefs, checked August 2026). Put those two numbers side by side and the brand looks like the whole market.
Then look at what advertisers pay. In the same data, a click on "best cam sites" goes for about $3.50 in Google's ad auction and "best sex cam sites" for about the same, while "cam sites" costs about $1.70 and "stripchat" $0.90. People bidding real money have decided the comparison query is worth roughly four times the brand query, and they're right: the guy typing "best cam sites" has a card and no site yet, and the guy typing "stripchat" has already chosen. Those brand clicks belong to Stripchat. The comparison clicks are the ones we live on, and they're the one kind of query a cam site can't win by itself — Stripchat's homepage can't tell you it's the best cam site and be believed, but a list run by somebody else can. That's the job.
Page five still pays
Something I didn't expect when I started is how deep the demand goes. On one of my lists the query "porn sites" sent 456 clicks to the homepage over a 28-day window, from an average position of 42 — that's page five. The head terms in this niche are so big (284,000 US searches a month for "porn sites", 77,000 for "best porn sites") that a ranking most SEOs would write off still puts real people on the page, and every step up is worth thousands more. Google doesn't put an AI answer on top of these queries, there's no shopping carousel, and people keep scrolling. A list at position 12 isn't a problem to fix, it's income.
Every figure in this article was checked in August 2026 and will drift, so read each one as an indication of scale.
What happens after the click
The click is only half of it. Where it lands decides whether the user buys.
A long time ago I settled on a rule for the cam sections I run: the top four sites link straight out, and everything below them goes through a review first. It sounds like a technicality, but it isn't. The top four are names the reader already knows, Stripchat among them, and putting a page between him and the site would only lose him. Further down he's still comparing, and that's where a review earns its keep: what the free chat actually gives you, what a private costs per minute, what the token packs are, and whether the site was upfront about all of it. The reader who arrives at Stripchat from a page like that already knows what he's about to spend. Directory traffic converts because of that second page — take it away and you've got a wall of logos.
That's what Porneed is for. 238 reviews since the July launch, each with a price table I read off the site myself, in a clean browser, with the date printed under it. Sites are ranked on whether they're any good, not on who pays the best revshare, and that rule doesn't bend for anyone. Stripchat sits at #2 in the cam category with 4.6 out of 5, the review spells out why, and the traffic from that page goes through my Stripcash link like everything else on the site. Nobody bought the position, and the ranking reflects my own editorial assessment of features, pricing, free tier and overall user experience.
What I'd tell anyone running a list
Check the prices you publish, on the site, yourself. Token prices change by country and by promo, and a review quoting last year's packs loses the buyer at checkout, which is the worst possible place to lose him. Say in the text that rates depend on where and when you look — readers trust you more for it, not less.
Rank on the reader's question. My cam pages are scored on library, stream quality, how honest the free tier is, and how the site behaves once you've got tokens. Stripchat earns its place on a free tier that's really free, per-minute rates you see before you commit, and VR cams nobody else has matched. If I moved sites around for payout, readers would smell it inside a month and those page-five clicks would go somewhere else.
Measure the second click. The number that predicts revenue isn't how many people leave your list, it's how many of them left from a page where they'd already read what the site costs. I'm collecting that on Porneed now, and in a couple of months I'll be able to put a signup from a bare listing next to one from a review and show you the difference.
None of this has changed much in twelve years. The buyer searches for a comparison, reads one page that's straight with him about prices, and clicks. We're the page in the middle, and it's a better place to be than most people think.
Disclosure: this article includes examples from the author's own review site, where some links are affiliate links, including Stripcash links. Rankings are based on editorial criteria and are not determined by affiliate payout.