Long before this site existed, our reviewer spent 2013 testing and writing up more than seventy adult webcam sites on an earlier project. Some of those platforms are still running today, several got quietly absorbed into bigger networks along the way, and we haven’t kept close enough tabs on the rest to say with confidence which are still active and which aren’t. Revisiting that archive is a genuinely strange experience regardless — a snapshot of an industry that looked completely different from the one you’d recognise now.
This isn’t a list of reviews, and it isn’t a “these sites are dead” list either — we can only speak confidently to current status for the ten sites we still actively review today. It’s a look back at what the cam world was actually like in 2013, paraphrased from those original notes, before Chaturbate became a household name and years before sites like Stripchat or CamSoda even existed.
The Sites Still Standing
Ten of the platforms from that 2013 archive are still around today, and still reviewed on this site. If you want the full before-and-after on any of these, each review now includes a dedicated “Then vs Now” comparison pulling directly from the original 2013 notes:
- Chaturbate — a relative newcomer in 2013, having only launched in 2011
- LiveJasmin — already a decade old and the industry’s premium benchmark
- ImLive — already an award-winning veteran, having launched back in 2002
- Xcams — then offering phone and SMS billing options that have since disappeared entirely
- Flirt4Free — already 17 years old, dating back to 1996
- MyFreeCams — already the free-viewing outlier it still is today
- XLoveCam — the French-owned platform behind a cluster of niche sister-sites
- BongaCams — brand new at the time, just over a year old
- SakuraLive — the Japanese-niche specialist, four years into operation
- Cams.com — already the oldest name on this entire list, dating to 1996
Streamate also survives today, though we don’t currently carry a dedicated review for it. Back in 2013 it was already one of the industry’s biggest players — and, as the next section covers, it was quietly powering a lot more of the industry than its own name suggested.
Rebrands, Whitelabels & Absorbed Brands
Not every 2013 cam site was really its own company. A surprising number were reskinned versions of a handful of bigger platforms, something that only became obvious once you compared reviews side by side. (As with the rest of this piece, these notes describe the ownership structure as it stood in 2013 — we haven’t re-verified whether these specific arrangements are still in place today.)
Streamate’s hidden empire
Several sites we reviewed independently turned out to be the exact same backend wearing a different coat of paint. CamCrush.com used the identical database, models, and pricing structure as Streamate — our reviewer noted the company behind it operated over 30 paysites total. LiveFreeFun.net was even more direct about it, openly describing itself as a “little sister site” that ran faster simply because it had far fewer registered members competing for bandwidth. Camlords.com was another look-alike, sharing the same webcam platform and pricing down to the decimal.
The Flirt4Free twin
VideoChat.com was Flirt4Free’s whitelabel, run by the same company (Video Secrets / VS Media). Same models, same chatroom engine, same pricing — the only real difference was that Flirt4Free used a black background and VideoChat used a lighter one.
The PussyCash family
Sexier.com shared ownership with ImLive under the PussyCash network, and undercut its sister site with a “Happy Hour” pricing window that dropped rates as low as 0.20 credits per minute on selected models.
Acquired outright
FreeCamStars.com launched as a genuinely independent site in 2011 and built its own following — until it was bought out by the company behind Streamate, at which point its entire original model roster was swapped for Streamate’s network. The site kept its own name and a few cosmetic touches, but the substance underneath had completely changed hands.
The LiveJasmin network
LSAwards.com (Live Sex Awards) was built by the same company as LiveJasmin, and functioned as a highlights reel — streaming the most popular models from LiveJasmin and its sister site Joyourself in one place, at noticeably cheaper rates than LiveJasmin itself charged.
More From the 2013 Archive
The rest of the archive covers a huge range of sites, several of which are still active today. A handful stood out enough at the time to be worth mentioning specifically:
- WebcamKing.com (still online) organised its entire site around themed “kingdoms” — Girls, Couples/Groups, Fetish, Transsexuals, Lesbians, Gays, and Straight Guys — rather than the usual flat category list, and claimed over 35,000 registered performers.
- FetishGalaxy.com (still online) ran a genuinely unusual “Frequent Fuckers Club” loyalty ladder (Member → Sexy Silver → Sexy Gold → Sexy Platinum) and a “local spots” directory pointing users toward real-world fetish-friendly bars and clubs in their city — a feature we never saw replicated anywhere else.
- DXLive.com (still online) greeted every new visitor with a Japanese-language age-verification screen by default, years before SakuraLive made a specialty out of the Japanese-cam niche. Pricing was broken into granular per-action charges — 0.2 points a minute extra just for HD, separate charges for cam2cam and remote toy control.
- JuicyNetwork.com, running since 1999, kept a live “Top 10” leaderboard of the week’s highest-rated models front and centre on the homepage.
- BabeCamSex.com was the outlier of the entire archive: no free preview of any kind (a real rarity even then), billing handled through phone calls or premium SMS rather than a credit card in some cases, and a roster so small our reviewer counted just two or three models online on a typical day.
- CamCity.com had only just launched when we covered it, with a grand total of 48 registered models and just 11 of them actually online during testing — one of the smallest rosters in the entire archive.
Beyond those, the following sites all had full reviews on the original project. We haven’t individually re-checked the current status of each one, so we’re not making any claim here about which are still running and which aren’t: iFriends, WebcamClub, LiveAsianWebcams, VIPcams, CamContacts, LiveSexAsian, Naked.com, Camorous, SmutCams, SecretFriends, Pornication, LivePrivates, CamWithHer, ICGirls, CamPrime, LivePimpin, PeekShows, Extasycams, Privatefeeds, CameraBoys, AllBBWcams, Asians247, ScoresLive, Allcams, Webcamwiz, Xlovefetish, LiveAsianGirlCams, Shemale.com, Ragazzeinvendita, Topcams, sexxxylivecams, Camspot, Stripshow, Camperfect, Cams247, iCams, Camsathome, Seventeenlive, Tubecamgirl, Fetishgirls, Maturescam, Live-Cam-Sex.dk, ClassyCams, ItsLive, LiveAsianCamGirls, 2LipsLive, Strip4Bit, FlatFeeCams, and Supermen.com.
What Actually Changed
Looking back across all seventy-plus reviews, a few patterns stand out that don’t show up when you only look at one site at a time:
- Consolidation was already happening in 2013. Even then, a handful of parent companies (Streamate, PussyCash, the LiveJasmin network, Video Secrets) quietly owned or powered a large chunk of the “independent” sites on the market. That trend only accelerated — most of today’s cam affiliate landscape runs through a small number of networks like CrakRevenue for exactly this reason.
- Free-to-watch wasn’t yet the default. Plenty of 2013-era sites, including some of the era’s biggest names, offered no free preview at all — a stark contrast to today’s market, where the freemium tip-based model (pioneered by sites like Chaturbate) has become the industry standard.
- Niche specialists carved out a real identity. SakuraLive’s Japanese focus and XLoveCam’s cluster of fetish/trans/mature sister-sites both gave those platforms a distinct reason to exist beyond just competing on scale — a strategy that clearly worked, since both are still going strong 13 years later.
If you’re curious how any of the surviving sites actually compare feature-for-feature and price-for-price against their 2013 selves, the individual reviews linked above each carry a full breakdown.
