Dan Hogue was just a single father in search of a business that would afford him enough economic and personal freedom to raise his son. In 1998, after a stint in the vending-machine business—selling everything from gumballs to stickers—he ventured into what eventually became a lucrative career in the adult industry.
Hogue and his second wife "broke into the adult scene" by starting an amateur/swinger membership site based on their own fondness for the lifestyle. At its height, the "amateur site" had some "some 3,000 members," according to Hogue. Following the success of their site, the Hogues became very active in the amateur community, which led to the idea for CamZ, now one of the Web’s largest providers of live hardcore content. The company initially used the domain AmateurCamZ, since neither CamS nor CamZ was available at the time. However, Hogue later approached Mark Burke, who owned CamZ, and worked out an auspicious deal.
It wasn’t all smooth sailing from there, though. At the time, potential client companies and their members claimed to be happy with the content they already had. The business consensus was that live pay sites were merely an "up-sell," Hogue said. "From the beginning, we knew we had to do things differently in order to be successful," said he said. "The market was very competitive, so creating content was the key to becoming successful."
CamZ ended up setting the tone for the future. Soon, companies discovered live content would "attract, convert, and retain members longer. Members wanted live content in their members areas," Hogue explained. The site served as a content provider, offering hardcore amateur shows featuring heterosexual couples and girl-on-girl action. However, budgets for adult website content dropped sharply because "there was a crunch [in] programs and content purchasing. Fifty-thousand-dollar budgets went down to $15,000 budgets."
While the live performances added value, CamZ faced other economic growing pains. Like many online adult businesses, CamZ began on a shoestring budget. "There was no money for advertising, so all business was done through referrals or direct contact," Hogue commented. "We financed this with my credit cards and profits from other businesses."
With the launch of the spin-off site PrivateCamZ, "everything started to move quickly," recalled Hogue, who created the almost-instantly successful PrivateCamZ as a one-on-one provider of hardcore content for consumers.
Hogue attributes the early financial success of PrivateCamZ to traffic from CamZ. The new approach to content didn’t hurt, either, he added.
"We didn’t even use studios," Hogue laughed. "[But], we had real amateur performers doing pay-per-minute [scenes]. These girls were American, Canadian, and British and were already doing shows on CamZ. Now they could have sites of their own where they could earn more of a percentage, get their sites hosted for free, obtain content for their sites, and receive up to 75 percent of all funds earned through their traffic to PrivateCamZ on a system built for amateurs. It was and still is pretty cool."
As he had done before following CamZ’s success, Hogue followed up his second successful content site by launching CamZCash, an affiliate program with many niche- and personality-based websites featuring girls and couples who already were doing live shows on CamZ and performing on PrivateCamZ.
"CamZCash was created to help affiliates maximize website exposure and conversions," Hogue said. "We think this addition to our program will help and will fit nicely with all that we do. We can showcase the different ways to effectively use the content in the members areas, as well as provide a way for affiliates to make additional revenue from follow-me up-sells from both our sites and from other partner programs.
"For instance, a member is sent to one of our membership sites—the affiliate gets paid. That member buys time on PrivateCamZ—the affiliate gets paid. [The same person] buys a toy from a partner program in our system—the affiliate gets paid again," he continued. "These are the types of things we are planning for the CamZCash Program."
In the next five years, CamZ plans to expand and diversify. "We are changing gears from focusing primarily on our content to completing and improving the affiliate program of our PrivateCamZ system," explained Hogue. "We also plan on adding additional tools, layouts, and white-label options in order to attract more and more webmasters."
Hogue also hopes to extend CamZ and CamZCash into the gay market. "We want to do for the [all-male] market what we have done for the girl [and] amateur markets by providing amateur male performers the same opportunities to offer shows to members," explained Hogue. "We aim to bring male/gay performers together in a Gay Amateur CamZ Network and effectively market for the performers and sites that are in need of quality content. Our model has proved to be such a great success for the girls, and the guys should have the same opportunity."
