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The year is 1996. These are the adventures of Jennifer Ringley, who was the first to put erotic content on the web using a webcam and made money from it. She is considered the first “camgirl” and even then showed glimpses of her life, including nude scenes, sex with her boyfriend and masturbation.

It’s been almost 30 years since Jennifer Ringley came up with the idea of publicly showing parts of her private life on the web. At the beginning, the then 20-year-old showed stills with her webcam in a rhythm of three minutes, but from the beginning there was a lot on offer: in addition to everyday scenes, there was also sex with her boyfriend and open-hearted masturbation to see. She described herself as a “lifecaster” and not a porn actress.

In 1998, the then-new media form earned her an invitation to appear on the Late Show with David Letterman.

According to Jennifer Ringley, she came up with the idea when she saw a camera that transmitted the view of an aquarium to the web. She wanted to continue this concept to the “human aquarium”, however, in the beginning only a few friends watched her daily life. This quickly changed when she got a lot of positive feedback and made her cam public. The concept of erotic livecam was born.

One important element was still missing: payment. This she added later, at the quite moderate rate of five dollars per month. In return, paying customers saw an up-to-date image every minute, while freeloaders only saw one every 15 minutes. It also offered subscribers an archive of previous images and a chat.

Success and popularity called for imitators, for example Ana Voog tried to follow Jennie’s success with “Anacam”. It wasn’t easy, after all, Jennifer Ringley got up to four million visitors on her cam – every day. At the time, she outperformed the vast majority of popular non-adult offerings.

With attention came financial success. However, Jenny was the first to experience something that many others had to face later.

PayPal as a buzzkill

At the climax, so to speak, came the abrupt and then also final end. PayPal, which was used for billing, basically banned erotic content and eventually blocked Jennycam. This virtually eliminated Ringley’s income, and from then on she worked partly as a web designer, but mostly enjoyed her “regained privacy.” From then on, little was heard of her, the last time the now married Jennifer Johnson gave an interview to the BBC in 2016.

Webcam pioneer

Nevertheless, Jennifer is undisputedly the pioneer in this field par excellence. She was the first woman who presented herself erotically on the Internet and received money for it. She was followed by millions of women. And almost thirty years ago, it was already apparent that (mainly) men are willing to spend money on such a service.

The very last picture of the Jennicam: At the end of 2003 Jennifer Ringley ended her until then successful offer. The actual webcam business with streaming offers had already been in operation for four years at this point.

https://web.archive.org/web/20031227221244/http://www.jennicam.org:80/