Market saturation, which is what happens when too much of a thing is offered, forces a notable drop in the price of the thing, no matter what it its. For example, Joe’s Ice Cream Cart may be able to sell 100 ice cream cones a day for a $5/per cone handsome profit. However, if there are ten ice cream places in the same area, the price as well as volume of traffic greatly drops. Demand may be constant, but market oversupply leads to price imbalances.
This is happening right now with the online prostitution market, where Newsweek reports that women who have been “camming” for extra money are finding it harder to earn money from selling themselves because so many are going in out of desperation.
The application for the federal Small Business Association’s Economic Injury Disaster Program stipulates that anyone who presents “live performances of a prurient sexual nature” or derives their income from “the sale of products or services, or the presentation of any depictions or displays, of a prurient sexual nature,” is ineligible for its support.
For many, their best option is to move solely to online sex work, uploading videos to paid-for subscription accounts on sites such as OnlyFans and ManyVids, otherwise known as camming. But this is not a simple solution.
“The market was already very saturated pre-COVID-19,” Reya Sunshine, a stripper who is now solely working online, told Newsweek. “It will be rough for strippers or escorts who move online and haven’t yet built an online audience. It takes time.”
Shelby Paris, an experienced sex worker who said she is losing thousands of dollars a month because online work is now her only source of income, said the move to digital is harder than people imagine, especially for those attempting it for the first time.
“From personal experience, I feel like a lot of newer models will flood the cam rooms, but they’ll realize it is super hard and not follow through with getting on,” Paris told Newsweek. “It is hard to cam and I give the all full-time camgirl major props for hustling and continuing to get on every single day.” (source)
Camming as a concept needs to die for moral reasons, but that is another story.
For now, the trend that even the prostitutes are starting to have a hard time making rent because of market oversaturation is a sign of serious economic troubles that affect all and are likely to only get worse in the future.