LOS ANGELES—After strip clubs across the country shut their doors, along with most other entertainment venues, bars and restaurants, in response to the coronavirus pandemic, online entrepreneur Justin LaBoy had an idea — duplicate the strip club experience on Instagram.
His nightly “Demon Time” live streams, despite repeated attempts to shut them down, have proven to be not only a source of entertainment for strip club aficionados — including a list of celebrities — but a source of income for suddenly out-of-work exotic dancers, according to a report on the phenomenon by the pop culture site Complex.
“We all need to be making money right now, especially if you’re what the world considers a ‘non-essential worker’ and you lost your job,” LaBoy, reportedly a former professional basketball player, told the site.
When he started the regular livestream for his 60,000 Instagram followers, he quickly found that many of the women who joined as guests were “dancing, twerking, taking it all off” without getting anything in return.
“These women shouldn’t do this for free,” he told Complex. “The rest was history. The women who went live made nothing less than $1,000 that night, with one woman leaving with $4,000.”
But when he saw a list of well-known names logging on to the “Demon Time” livestream, LaBoy said to himself, “Oh, shit! I might have something special here,” he told Complex.
According to a report on the virtual strip club scene by The New York Times, celebrity visitors to LaBoy’s Demon Time have included, “Music artists like the Weeknd and Diplo and many top N.F.L. and N.B.A. players and influencers,” with Shaquille O’Neal, and rappers Meek Mill, YG, Casanova and Lil Yachty all featuring as “guests” on the Instagram livestream.
For each the dancers who join the stream, LaBoy includes a Cash App user name, allowing viewers to throw money at them — virtually, though the money itself is real enough.
Because Instagram bans explicit content, LaBoy starts a new IG page every night to host the stream staying a step ahead of the censors at the Facebook-owned site. According to the Times report, the new pages are =likely to pick up 30,000 followers in the first hour of going online.
One dancer, “Alexis,” told The Times that she has raked in about $18,000 from performing on Demon Time and similar Instagram Live streams that have popped up in its wake — thanks largely to LaBoy’s policy of strongly encouraging followers to log into the livestreams to pay up.
“Blue-checks better pay,” he told The Times, a reference to “verified” Instagram users, who are often celebrities.
Alexis also told The Times that working online is much less demanding that performing at “real world” strip clubs.
"If I’m in the club, I’m there for eight hours,” she told The Times. “On Instagram Live, it’s five minutes. Five minutes compared to eight hours of work.”
Photo By StockSnap / Pixabay
