A version of this feature appears in the June issue of AVN magazine. Click here for the digital edition.
LOS ANGELES—Joey Kim wants to continue honing her craft as she approaches her 10-year anniversary as a cam girl.
“I want to expand in my dance knowledge so I can become an even better entertainer online,” Kim tells AVN. “I actually hope to collaborate more in general with other performers in porn and in camming—and in dance as well—in these next upcoming years.
“And I feel like this is going to be a big year for collaborations for me.”
Driven by an unwavering creative spirit coupled with a passion for performing, the talented aerialist and cam artist in recent months has brought that desire to innovate to the emerging global social media platform, AVN Stars.
On March 17, not long after Kim joined the industry friendly content sharing site powered by AVN Media Network, she announced the development of camera switching for her next live stream. Kim’s tech-savvy is no longer a secret after successfully building her state-of-the-art official site, JoeyKim.tv, where she has introduced this and other advances in streaming technology to her adoring members through the years.
“I think I was lucky to have had the years of experience not just in camming but in photography—like learning that in school and then later taking that with me,” Kim says.
“And then learning about professional pornography production, which was something I also felt like—although people see it as two different things—actually helped me flourish and upped my production level to the same caliber as production companies would have. But by myself.”
Kim signed up for AVN Stars when she was in St. Petersburg, Russia, where at press time in April she was continuing to make the best of her quarantine.
“Everything is closed but it’s not as panicky here I think,” Kim says.
She has been traveling the world for the past three years, living and working for extended periods in places such as Prague, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Barcelona, Bilbao, Spain; Canary Islands, Amsterdam and Lisbon, Portugal.
She made her way to the Russian capital in late February, renting an apartment in a high-rise building and going live on AVN Stars in between working with her tech team on JKTV. Kim on the morning of our interview said she ventured out for groceries earlier in the day, but for the most part had been staying home as she rides out the coronavirus pandemic.
Meanwhile, she’s trying to control how much media she consumes to curb her stress levels.
“I just started to stop reading the news as much and it’s helping,” she says.
“I was really excited to join AVN Stars. I was mostly just trying to find my new space on the internet, like my own corner where I could feel free to express myself without feeling like I might get shadow-banned or censored in any way. And I feel like the world needs a social media platform that is sex-worker friendly.”
Kim says she gravitated toward AVN Stars because she wanted to try something new.
“That was sort of the only reason to have a space outside of my own space that I’m building, too, to connect with people,” Kim says. “Like a more public forum. And a place to stay connected with my members.
“I’m really enjoying the features. I feel like it makes it easier to connect with my fans in a more one-to-one, personal way. And I think that the members are enjoying it, too. I feel like there’s been so much support there. And I think that that one-to-one connection isn’t something that was so…”
She continues, “I want to say it’s easier to reach me now and it’s easier to connect with me because they feel like they have a space where they can communicate with me privately, whereas the other spaces, the other platforms I would perform in are more public and it’s more like one-to-many.
“So I think in this way I’m learning a lot about my viewer base and my fans and I feel like they’re learning a lot about me, too.”
Kim performed her first live show using the AVN Stars streaming feature on March 14.
“It was a really good experience. A lot of my fans who used to watch me on cam showed up so I got to see a lot of people I haven’t seen for a long time, so it was like a big reunion,” Kim tells AVN. “And I think that the new space is exciting for them as well.”
Kim points to features such as “the full-width stream and the ability to set goals” that make AVN Stars appealing for her live shows.
“There are a lot of features in the live streaming section that I was not expecting to be there,” Kim admits. “I didn’t think it would have so many features at all. And so it was exciting for me to see that there was a virtual wallet and that there are goals—and that beautiful full-width stream that a lot of my members haven’t had the chance to experience, except on my own site. Yeah it was like a big party.
“Everyone was really excited to see me again. It was a huge success.”
Because she was streaming from St. Petersburg, Kim had to get out of bed early in the morning.
“And so it gives me this opportunity, especially in front of these big windows, to have a stream that is constantly changing, where my setting looking different than it was when I first signed on,” Kim says. “So I rented this apartment for a long term now. And I chose St. Petersburg because I like the city. I like that everything is quite affordable. And I feel like it’s very convenient to be able to step out and have access to everything I need around me. It’s sort of why I decided to make my home here.”
Kim says when she first started her globetrotting that she wasn’t as organized as she is now.
"There would be times where I would be checking out of my AirBnB and have like nowhere to go yet because I forgot or I didn’t book someplace,” she recalls. “But now I’m a little bit more organized after traveling for a little bit longer. So I plan my year a little bit further out, maybe like two or three months ahead. But now with the coronavirus a lot of my original plans were cancelled.
“But I try to plan at least a month or two months ahead and usually it’s based off…it depends on what I’m doing. If I have some particular goal that requires me to be somewhere. For instance when I would run for rank on MFC I would fly somewhere beautiful and I would rent a beautiful place and I would make sure my location and my space and everything looks great.
“And in those scenarios I would typically plan my rank months sometimes even five months ahead. But otherwise it really just depends on the weather and where I feel like visiting next.”
Kim was in Asia when she won Miss MFC in August 2019.
“I do have some particular countries I like more than others that I’m constantly going back to. I really like Spain. I really like the Canary Islands. I want to own my first home there eventually,” Kim reveals. “But I typically don’t have so much of a plan. I have a lot of freedom and I feel pretty blessed for that. I just go wherever my heart tells me to.”
She gravitates toward the Canary Islands, which is a Spanish archipelago off the coast of northwestern Africa, because “it just has everything.”
“It feels like a European California to me, where you get the beaches, you get nice weather all year round. You have the cities. Everything is there,” Kim says. “Everything you could possibly want. Like mountains and oceans and people are friendly. I think the island has some kind of magical energy about it. I feel like it has a soul, you know.”
In addition to building up her presence on AVN Stars, Kim says her focus remains on her baby, JKTV.
“But before I make it anything bigger I want it to be first of all functioning in an optimal way that I’m happy with,” she says. “As of now JKTV is a little bit of like my testing site. Like my project, where I can kind of build this thing and test it with my fans and build on it without rushing things or releasing something that’s not fully complete yet.
“So I’ve just been sort of taking my time with it. There’s been a lot of progress and we feel like it is close to being ready to be opened and shared and released to the public. This is a bigger project but as of now we’re in the testing phases and doing some incredible things in the live streaming sector. I’m very excited.”
An expert on the Lyra who has performed live at shows in New York and Thailand, Kim debuted on MFC in 2010 as a sophomore studying photography at Parson’s School of Design, switching to nude in 2013.
Her experience during the past decade also includes extensive work with a professional production crew that shot for scenes for studios such as Mindgeek, X-Art and Playboy in Europe.
“So I feel like that that experience was very invaluable for me because I was able to follow a whole production crew and learn every step of production to later then take onto my own productions and my own streams,” she says.
“So yeah that’s something really special and with my team of coders we were able to utilize AVN’s platform and to create a code that will allow the user on AVN when tipping a certain amount it would calculate the amount of their tip to a timer and that timer would then be triggered and would automatically flip the scene to the close-up camera and would stay on until the timer is up and then it would switch back.
“So if they continue to keep the timer going it would just stay on that close-up camera. And that is the next thing we will be playing with on my next stream.”
Now as she eyes the rest of 2020 and beyond, Kim wants to give back.
“I just feel like I have so much knowledge and experience to share,” she says. “And I really want to at this point in my life create a community where I would be able to share that knowledge that I’ve collected throughout the years and hopefully be able to help others become better performers and find their own, I guess their own groove. Their own method of working in this industry that works for them.”
Kim continues, “Because I also understand that what works for me or what works for someone else doesn’t necessarily work for everyone. So it’s not so much like I would want to create a community where I would teach people how to work a certain way, I would more-so just want to give them the tools to develop their own method of performing and their own vision for their brand.
“Camming has become a huge industry and it’s probably the only industry that I know that there really is no space for learning. There is no course. There is no guidance. You’re pretty much just out there learning yourself and you’re really on your own. And I remember when I first started camming especially that I felt like I made a lot of mistakes. And I had to learn from those mistakes the hard way. And I think it would’ve been really invaluable for me to have had that available to me.
"To have had some sort of tool or some sort of method of being able to grow and to accumulate more knowledge about what I was doing, which I did through experience. But how wonderful would it be to have some sort of guidance.”
