May 07, 2008 An interview with Andi Lopez of WebCam Island
In this Feature Article Society will be speaking with Andi Lopez. Andi and his business partner Alfa Winger are the owners of WebCam Island, a beautifully decorated sim with a distinct, European theme. There are numerous shops on the island where one can shop and spend time innocently enough. If you like to earn money camping or in one of the various cleaning occupations you can do that here. But be prepared, once inside the clubs all innocence will be lost. The clubs owned by Andi and Alfa cater to adult visitors in two very different ways. The first club, the Escort Redpages, is a club that’s been in Second Life for some time and features avie escorts and other entertainment venues commonly found throughout Second Life. It was taken over by Andi and Alfa and moved to WebCam Island. The second club however is the primary reason for this article and what makes WebCam Island unique. Webcam Island derives its name from this second club and is the largest draw to the island. It functions to bring together paying guests with a live connection to a willing provider via web cam. In other words *ehem*, you can pay for a much enhanced version of cyber sex. A service once reserved for member sites on the web, Andi and Alfa have brought the service in-world and have made it accessible to Second Life. No, we’re not talking about watching an avie utilizing a pose ball, what you will view is a real live person providing a service that you pay for. So let’s talk with Andi and ask him a few questions about his business.
SLS: Hi Andi, thank you for your time. What you have in Second Life is very unique, and I’m sure that our readers are curious to hear more about your business. Your island is very nice and a pleasant build to visit. Having recently turned two of age this last April, why don’t you tell us about how you got your start and those early months when you were first in business.
WCI: Hello and thank you. The one who is guilty for WebCam Island is Alfa, he came into SL as a player and he saw sex as the top target for SL avatars. He started a small club hidden somewhere on a region with 2-3 pics of our girls on the walls. Then we saw the interest and the opportunity and we started to think big. He dragged me into SL, we bought an island and we started to put our minds to work and slowly we made what you see today.
SLS: There are a great many shops on your build, please drop a few names and let us know whom we can expect to find vending there and what your rental fees and rental terms are.
WCI: We added the rental shops not too long ago, people were starting to ask for things to buy here, there are people who come in SL only for SLCamz and they don’t know SL offers more than this. The terms and prices are same like any other malls or vendor shops around SL. You can find here Alyssa Bijoux, Fierce, Adored Clothing, Custom Inkz ,C&S, UK Couture, REALSM and many, many others.
SLS: Please briefly tell us about your clubs, their services, and entertainment venues that I might not have touched on earlier.
WCI: You saw 2 clubs here, one of them, The Escorts Red Pages we bought it few months ago and moved it here; we were thinking it’s good to have a place for SL escorts also. The other one is as you said a unique place in SL where you can find Live WebCam Escorts, you can even watch demo videos or even watch them Live in SL on a screen in one of our events.
SLS: Of the two clubs, which do you find to be the central focus/most profitable on the island?
WCI: Thats SLCamz , The Red Pages Club is not a profitable business and we work 24/7 to keep WebCam Island a unique place in SL and make it bigger and better. We always have projects to offer more and more exposure for our club, and we never stop thinking of our future projects.
SLS: Focusing more on the web cam side of business, you started with 3 girls and now have 16. That’s an accomplishment of its own. How do you recruit your help?
WCI: Alfa and I not new to managing a WebCam business. Actually this is the way we met a few years ago and this is our real life business also. We never hire WebCam girls from SL, we bring our own girls and teach them how to play SL. It’s not easy because it’s hard to find girls who are old in the business and know everything about it.
SLS: What are your typical hours of operation? What do you find to be the busiest hours of operation, and how do the girls handle the back-log when it becomes very busy? How do you handle the challenge of staffing a web cam operation 24/7?
WCI: I think 24/7, most of the time it depends on how many people are online and how many girls are online but usually good hours are after 4-5 PM SLT.
SLS: Do you cater to both heterosexual and gay customers and those with alternative lifestyles? Who decides what a web cam “performance” will consist of?
WCI: We have all kinds of customers, and as you know in SL is a very big gay community, we also had some requests about adding male performers and this is one of our future projects. Regarding the performance I cannot say as I never get between the customer and performer, it’s their decision what the webcam show will consist off and we never tell them how to perform.
SLS: WebCam is a unique service in SL. How do you handle the streaming media? Is it an application that both you and Alfa scripted?
WCI: Alfa brought into SL a live stream server system, but for the moment we use it only in live non-nude demo events, we are still working on making the live video quality to work better in SL. As you know if a place gets laggy everything is going crazy so this is still a problem for us, so most of the time we use Skype and MSN because that’s the best quality we can offer at the moment.
SLS: Obviously there are certain technologies a visitor must have installed and running properly in order to partake in the web cam service. Why don’t you tell us now what is required to view the video and what are your most common complaints from visitors who cannot participate due to unforeseen, technical failure.
WCI: We don’t get too many complaints, some time people try to see a demo video without QuickTime installed but that’s all really. In regards to the webcam streaming, most of the time the customer will choose which method they wish to use which consists of any kind of messenger that offer cam to cam stream.
SLS: Payment is always necessary I’m sure you’ll agree, how does the customer pay both you and the web cam host? What are the typical fees, and who sets these fees?
WCI: Fees are set by Alfa and I and nobody change the price without our consent. Payment is made avatar to avatar, customer and performer and prices starts from 5000L$ for 10 minutes and can go to 14,500L$ for 30 minutes or 29,000L$ for 1 hour. We always offer discounts and special attractions to convince our customers to come back. And since our location is a unique place dedicated to the webcam business usually people come back very fast.
SLS: How do you plan to grow in the future, what do you foresee as your potential growth market. Have you and Alfa set long-term goals for increasing business?
WCI: We always think for the future, we have some projects working on it that I can’t speak about them yet. But adding new things and new girls makes our customers happy.
SLS: Thank you Andi for your time with us today. We look forward to hearing from you in your future endeavors and will watch your profile for any announcements right here on Society.
Thank you also for you and I hope to see you all at WebCam Island.
A few notes regarding Andi’s business:
Business hours: 24/7 @ WebCam Island
Email: andi@SLCamz.com
Website: http://www.slcamz.com
As mentioned, I will be doing a series of articles focusing on content creators and business in Second Life. If you have input in regards to good subjects for these articles please email me here for consideration. Thank you =)
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