Promote your room at Chaturbate

Cam models can now pay Chaturbate to promote themselves on the front page while they are online.  How much does it cost? For how long? Is it effective? Can the viewers help to promote the model? Read on.

Starting October, independent camgirls and boys may notice the sign “Promote your room” next to the “Announce you’re online” button at the top of the screen. (Update: starting Mar 2024, tippers can click on the “promote this room” button next to the “Send Tip” button to promote a model too) If you click on it, it expands and tells you that it can help you to get more viewers:

“Add your room to a rotating promoted spot on the homepage for 5 minutes.
Current price: 90 tokens”

So, what does it actually means?

Promote yourself on the home page of Chaturbate

But before you are too excited about this opportunity, read the details about this “Promoted Spot” very carefully.

“When offered, eligible Independent Broadcasters will be able to purchase a pre-selected duration of time to rotate in and out of a pre-selected “promoted” slot (e.g., the 9th slot on the front page of the Platform) with a “pool” of other qualifying, purchasing Independent Broadcasters.”

Duration: really 5 minutes long?

The answer is yes and no. Over the 5 minutes, you will be sharing the same slot on the front page with other cam models who are also willing to bid to advertise. We don’t know if you are sharing with 8 other people or 80 or a few hundred.  Only CB knows. I believe it varies and depends on whether the models consider that’s the peak time for earning by their experience.

Once your room is shown, by experience it stays for 45 seconds on a particular viewer’s page, no matter he scrolls down or not. After 45 seconds, the screen refreshes and a different model will be shown to him. This is per one user’s experience. If there are 100,000 visitors are searching at the home page of CB, then it is up to the algorithm to decide how often you will be picked to be shown. So, it is not as straightforward as occupying the page for 5 whole minutes. And don’t just think about the number of advertising models you are competing with.  It is more complicated than that. Here’s what Chatubate said about their secret rotation algorithm:

“Each time a promotion begins, all members of the “pool” go through an automated rotation process that decides which Independent Broadcaster will appear first in the promoted slot and the order of the rotation.”

“For example, while Independent Broadcaster “A” is currently being featured in the promoted slot for Community Member “1,” it is possible that Community Member “2” sees Independent Broadcaster “B” (or another member of the “pool”) in the promoted slot at that same exact moment. As such, since the order of the rotation will fluctuate based on when Community Members navigate to the front page of the Platform in relation to the amount of time remaining in a promotion, we cannot guarantee that each Community Member will see you in the promoted slot or see you for an equal amount of time.”

Which advertising cam model appears first?

Chaturbate has not revealed how they decide the order of appearance of the advertising cam girls on the promoted slot. As a programmer, I can imagine the specifications that the Marketing department gave to their IT team to include these criteria.

1. CB’s default secret sauce in general – we don’t know what’s CB’s secret sauce on prioritizing the models on the page. If they’re as smart as Stripchat, they may show models that come from the same country, or speak the same language as the tipper first, for example. Stripchat’s “Recommended for you” section implies that they are tracking what are the tippers’ preferences. It could be the nationality of the model, Caucasian, Asian, South American, or age group, say, whether the tipper likes a mid 20s or mature. The tipper may watch a lot of models with fuck machine, anal or whatever niche. If I were CB, when a tipper comes to CB or refresh the front page, I will make sure the page has models to his liking, then pick the highest bidder that has both satisfied his preference and does not have enough exposure base on the bidding price.
2. Bidding price – as an advertising platform, you would think they want to please the ones who paid more and so I presume those who paid the highest at that moment will have a priority in the queue to be shown.
3. Share of time you’ve got on the front page or count of new users brought to your room – One can’t just take the fee and not promoting the model at all because when time is up, the system shows the number of users brought to this room. They need to give you a fair try and show you on the front page. They can’t just shrug and announce that they have sent 0 users to you during this 5 minutes.
4. Popularity and quality of the show – If CB wants to make the most from that slot for everyone, they should show the model that has the best show or popularity. I can imagine if there’s active tipping and/or chatting in the room then it implies the model is engaging, which means that’s more likely that the thumbnail of the room looks good and get visitors to visit. This way, the model gains visitors, hopefully, turn into new followers and tippers. Visitors are happy to find new interesting shows and CB gets more sales.
5. Cam score – If there is no big difference in the tipping or chatting activities among these advertising rooms then maybe they have to resort to cam scores or what they called “Satisfaction score”. The satisfaction score on Chaturbate is decided by the visitors. When he has tipped at least 25 tokens, he can vote for or against the model. Therefore the higher the score the better. It reflects how well the model is doing based on the visitors’ votes. Separately, I can imagine CB has something like Stripchat, which basically calculates a model’s earning per hour. The more a model earns, the more sexy and engaging she is.

These are my guesses. There is probably a rating on these criteria and a total score is calculated to determine the order of appearance. Google Ads does something similar.

How much does it cost to promote?

When I click the “Promote your room” link near the top of the screen, it shows the “Current price: 120 tokens” and it’s updated every 20 seconds. Just like Google’s Ads, advertisers bid for the slot. Only in this case, the camgirls do not get to choose the price or cannot choose to offer a higher price. Their system calculates and decides what price to get in. A model only has the choice to accept it or wait for it to refresh every 20 seconds until she finds a reasonable price.

I tried it once and I paid 60 tokens. It is cheap probably because it’s still early afternoon in the U.S. Since then, I often see 80 to 120 tokens. But I heard that when this promotion was first introduced, someone has paid over 600 tokens!

How much is 600 tokens? Or how much is 60 tokens on Chaturbare for the cam girls? The answer is, each token worths USD0.05. ie. USD5 for 100 tokens. So, paying $5 to get some exposure for a few minutes is not bad, especially if you have a show ready and is going to attract tippers.

Update 2024-9-10: I heard in May, the bidding price for the model has gone up to 1,000 to 3.600 tokens. It is hard to believe that any model will pay USD50 to 180 for a 5-minute random exposure on the front page. Let alone tippers who pay nearly double because tippers typically pay $0.08 to $0.1 per token.

Tippers can “Promote this room” now

Starting March 2024, tippers can pay for the model to “Promote this room”. He should be able to find the “Promote this room” button near the “Send Tip” button.

If it looks grey out and you try to click it anyway, it will tell you that this room already has high visibility or already being promoted and so you can’t promote it now. Otherwise, you can check on the price, and confirm the payment if you find it reasonable.

If you like to support your model, Bongacams is another cam site that let members promote a model to the front page.

Bongacams lets tipper to boost a model to the top of the first page

Bongacams has a similar feature, which is to let the tipper promote a model, but model can’t promote herself by paying.

And it is only for tippers of a certain rank or above. One needs to be Sapphire, Titan, Diamond or Exclusive member before he can promote a model. It is not just paying money. And each level of membership has a different limit of how often he can do it.

• Sapphire member: once every 7 days
• Titan member: once every 3 days
• Diamond member: once a day
• Exclusive member: 3 times a day

When these member clicks the “Fan Boost” button to promote a model, she gets to go to the first place of the front page for 1 minute! That’s the best spot one can hope for. And sounds like it’s universal, as in every single visitor will see this promoted model during that 1 minute.

Since this feature is only available to a small percentage of customers and there are limits on how often they can use it. It is less likely to create a situation which there are many models are queuing for that number one position. If there is more than one it will be a small number.

Boost a model on Bongacams

What sort of models tend to pay for this promoted slot?

Obviously, the popular ones who already occupied the top 2 or 3 row don’t.

It’s more commonly seen the girls with a few tens viewers in the room, who they know have very thin chances of getting featured at the home page, or the ones with a couple hundred viewers, and would like to get more new followers by pushing herself on the front page by paying Chaturbate.

Alternatively, there are plenty of cam boys broadcast on Chaturbate, and we know there are even more competitions for tippers. Or they simply want more people to watch them cum on cam.

Is Chaturbate’s promoted slot effective?

I tried it only once and was paying a very low price, I must say it make hardly any difference. I heard other girls said the same too. Maye only a few pull it off. Some talked about spending around 500 tokens and earn over 10k tokens. What’s your experience?

Conclusion

The price for promoting varies a lot. But it’s only worthwhile if you are really planned and ready and have the most captivating view while you are being promoted to get the most results.