CamContacts Review

The camming industry has everything spanning household names (Chaturbate and StripChat) to smaller-scale projects that most won't know about. Today, we're looking at CamContacts - a live sex hub that's definitely the latter

Somewhat surprisingly, CamContacts is one of the oldest platforms we've ever reviewed. It was founded in 1999 - so we're expecting great things, considering they've had multiple decades to get their house in order. 

The exact structure of the platform back then has been lost to the ages, but its current iteration, based on blog post archives, suggests 2007 as the modern starting point for CamContacts.com.

CamContacts has received a number of award nominations over the years and has even won a few, though most of these come from the early half of the 2010s. Nominations include 'Live Cam Company of the Year' at the 2011 XBIZ Awards and 'Best Live Chat Website' at the 2011 AVN Awards. 

At the AW Awards in 2016, they won the 'Best Model-Friendly Affiliate Program': we can't really check this side of the business, but if it's true, it ought to reflected by numerous high-quality camgirls available for our viewing pleasure.

Today, we're going to dive straight in!

Model Selection

5

CamContacts has listings for male, female and transsexual camgirls: there is a section for 'girl/girl' entertainment, but none for males and females performing together. 

The overall setup and layout of the available webcam streamers is convoluted and frustrating - CamContacts does things differently from the big players, and unsurprisingly, we're not fans.

There were around 250 streams when we visited for our review; the exact number was impossible for us to extract, which we'll discuss in the female performer section below. When stacking this figure up against other options, it's middle of the pack, but only just. 

For some perspective, StripChat averages 7,000, LiveJasmin 1,500 and Chaturbate 5,000 cammers at any time. You do have options at CamContacts, but it's far slimmer pickings than our favorite spots.

Female Performers

Most of the action here comes from camgirls: what makes it hard to get the exact number of girls online is that they're spread across a large number of categories. Take a look:

We've opted to remove the 'make new friends' and 'long term or marriage' categories: we know what we're about. 

Now all of the adult softcore categories are independent of one another, so there are at least 196 girls there right now, but it gets tricky when we look at the hardcore area: quite a few in the 'Strip HiLo' category were also in the 'Not So Shy' category.

These individual categories do have descriptions available so you can figure out the specifics of what each one is about, but yeah, it's needlessly complex and annoying. Rivals keep it simple and CamContacts should too.

Many of the profiles here lack useful metadata, such as country of origin. 

A few girls do provide it, but the filtering setup makes it difficult for us to work out key metrics such as ethnicity, languages spoken and available services. Russian and Ukrainian camgirls are quite prevalent here, followed by Latinas. Colombians seem to be the majority of South American talent provided: standard for camming platforms.

On balance, quality here is decent, which is somewhat surprising given the relatively small nature of the service. No real biases that we noted, except maybe a skew toward younger for the Eastern European girls. Around 25% of listed cams are between 18 and 23 years of age.

CamContacts is pretty decent for fetish chat. It has a dedicated Dungeon channel, one of the more popular categories on the site.

This area contains submission, femdom, trampling, facesitting, BDSM and other kinks explored. We were impressed by their selection of mistresses and slaves (mostly femme tops). Could be a good option if you're looking for specialist private fetish shows.

Male Performers

As is shown in the above screenshot, no men were available for camming at all on CamContacts.com, despite there being a category for them. 

We did check back a few hours later and found none online again. The search area did allow us to see that male performers had been online in the last 24 hours and the last two were actually very attractive.

It's interesting: male sex cammers here are either incredibly hot and lean or they're just normal guys looking to make a few bucks and, more likely, just get off on being watched while they jerk it. 

Only 5 to 10 get online per day though, so we don't think this is an ideal spot for those who want to watch guys on cam.

Trans Performers

Unsure if 'Gender Benders' is a respectful name for performers in this area, but alas. 

Just a few dozen were available when we visited, and they were all MtF transsexuals. Although transvestites and crossdressers, as well as FtM cammers, are welcome here, they're not around to watch. Most of the trans camgirls are Asian: more than on other platforms, with the majority hailing from the Philippines. Quality is really good: trans Pinays always take fantastic care of themselves and if you can go for these types, they're available on CamContacts in reasonable numbers.

Couples

Just a couple of couples in the 'girl/girl' category: a pair of BBW MILFs from Romania and Ukrainian girls who were in their 20s. 

We'd like to see them offer a traditional couple section, too, since even smaller spots like this can pull in a dozen or so lovers every day who are willing to get down and dirty with one another.

Live Shows

4

Unlike most of the rival services out there, when you click on a preview thumbnail, you will be prompted to sign up: we're not fans of this, and we think it should ultimately be up to the camgirl whether or not she'll allow guests to spectate without creating a profile. 

We know it's bad for business and it's precisely why all of the big players have free access to most of their cammers when they're not in private sessions.

Additionally, you will be prompted to provide a credit card: if you don't provide details, you won't be allowed in. 

The only other platform we know with this type of setup is Streamate, and they're essentially a pay-to-play hub. Jumping through hoops like this is always discouraging for the customer: we'd like to see CamContacts embrace a modern approach to its accessibility.

Private Shows

There's no such thing as a free lunch at CamContacts and we mean that in the strictest possible sense: you'll need to pay for every single second that you're in a show. You can chat ahead of time with the host with messages only, but as soon as the cam is live, you're paying.

Additionally, some girls here aren't getting naked easily: they're teases, and you're more using it as a way to hang out and chat with them. The site even goes so far as to suggest you ask them ahead of time what you're getting - talk about a boner killer. It all seems so incredibly inefficient when you could use room topics and public previews, right?

Performers set their own rates and they seem to be in 10c intervals. The lowest we found in the softcore area was $0.90 per minute, with the average around $1.50 or so. If we look at 'Instant Action' camgirls, they're asking for $2.00 at a minimum, with some at $3.00 and beyond.

We do appreciate how clear the prompt is before you go into a show with a performer. 

It's probably worth mentioning that 'open session' can technically be joined by others and they're not doing so in a voyeur-like capacity. However, you're practically in a traditional private show, since anyone who's tuning in has to pay, and girls aren't regularly in active sessions.

One2One

If you really don't want anyone to join you in a show, you can opt for One2One. This makes your engagement completely exclusive - not even voyeurs can peep at what's going on.

Camgirls set their own rates here once again: some charge a small premium, others double. In the 'Instant Action' section, most tend to add $0.50 to $1.00 more. We checked over 50 available camgirls and only the one above was in a One2One session.

Cam to Cam

This isn't its own category per se, but since there are no others to mention, we might as well give it its own section. Cam-to-cam here is free, but hosts aren't required to enable it. In practice, all five girls we tested the platform with were willing to offer cam-to-cam sessions. 

Enabling it was simple enough and the camgirls had no issues with visual clarity or audio quality.

Stream Quality

5

We did our absolute best to try and get objective data metrics on CamContacts, but after 30 minutes of sniffing around in the console, we came up short and decided that estimations were our best option. 

Based on the 5 streams we sampled, we'd estimate that 720p to 2 Mb/s is where most of the shows are currently. Visual clarity didn't match the likes of Streamate or Chaturbate - both of which go to 1080p and 5 Mb/s.

We asked a camgirl what device she was using and she said Logitech MX Brio: this is a $200 piece of equipment that's capable of running at 4K, so the bottleneck is definitely on the end of CamContacts. 

Our thoughts on this topic are quite simple: if other sex cam websites offer 1080p streams to people visiting who don't even have an account yet, there's no excuse for you not offering it when all shows are pay-per-minute. We're skeptical of pay-only setups at the best of times, but if you're going to go down this route, make sure it's full HD with a stellar bitrate.

Additionally, CamContacts is a one-size-fits-all service: you cannot lower quality if you have bandwidth or device issues. This isn't a huge deal, but lots of small problems compound quickly.

Subjectively, cam shows aren't particularly special, nor particularly amateur. 

By virtue of it being a little harder to join than others, it tends to attract girls that are in it for the long haul, so don't expect too many first-timers or girls with poor backgrounds. All five girls we viewed were in their bedrooms and had reasonable lighting - a couple had props and toys too, so that's always good.

Site Design

4

CamContacts is in a usable state, but they're not doing themselves any favors when it comes to making it simple and convenient for the customer to get around and access what they want. 

As mentioned above, the categorization here is an absolute nightmare: we can understand that there's a place for 'softcore' and 'hardcore' areas, but even this doesn't make much sense to us: softcore generally means non-penetration, but surely that's not the deal here.

Intuitively, softcore to us in the camming sense would mean non-nude, but there's a strip section in the softcore area attached to a game: so does it just mean masturbation? We looked around the FAQ section and asked in the community chat: no explanation was given that made sense to us. 

We hate not having answers, but that's where we find ourselves trying to piece together exactly what divides softcore from hardcore here at CamContacts.

In terms of navigation and layout, CamContacts is usable, but it could be better. 

The theme is clearly dated, although they have an 'old version' link that's an absolute joy to behold. Here's what the site looked like many moons ago:

It does look better than this these days - but only just. It has some really weird filtering tools too: you can search by Zodiac sign, for instance. 

Since they have a 'find marriage' area, this might make a bit of sense, but if you're looking at the dozen online people there and considering Mercury's retrograde in your decision-making process, you need help.

No live preview thumbnails, sadly. 

All images are supplied by the camgirls, so you might end up spending a dollar or two on a particular performer only to find out they're AFK or engaging with another viewer.

Live Chat UX

Very basic: the hidden button on the right-hand side is to send a gift (these start at $10 and go up to $10,000) and the rest is self-explanatory. 

You can send emojis if you really want, but there aren't any GIFs available. Turning on Cam2Cam is simple and we do appreciate that. The site does have a full-screen mode that turns the chat transparent: it could be so much better if the chat wasn't centrally aligned and made quite a bit smaller.

Mobile UX

5

Here's what the main archive page of CamContacts looks like on a modern iPhone:

It's really important when you design a mobile version of a website to realize that space is at an absolute premium: only having two preview thumbnails here is painful, when having 8 to 12 is quite easy to do. So much of the screen real estate is occupied by large links and irrelevant text: a complete overhaul is desperately required.

Watching streams is okay on mobile, but there was an annoying delay when switching from vertical to horizontal. 

We'd like for pinch and zoom to be added too: currently the stream is slightly cropped in vertical mode, although it's less aggressive than other services, so chances of it impacting your viewing experience are limited.

You can still turn on Cam2Cam and tip on mobile: chat works well too.

Extra Features

6

CamContacts has a couple of notable extra features worth mentioning here.

ccMail and Community Chat

You can directly message camgirls before jumping into streams with a direct chat box, but there's also something called ccMail. It's hilariously bad: each message is sent individually and you cannot chain them together with a history that's clear and easy to follow. It's basically like sending emails to one another. 

You can attach images and videos to messages, up to a maximum size of 20 MB.

There's also the community chat, where girls tend to go to try and solicit private sessions with site members. 

Since everyone who registers has a credit card linked to their account, you'll get nudges from girls that want you to visit them and even have little ads that they sometimes post. It's not too spammy, but there's hardly a general flow of conversation between people. You'll sometimes get (private) messages too that are bland and generic. One girl messaged us with "Hello dear" - the opener of the century.

Strip HiLo

Historically, camming websites that try to introduce games tend to abandon them pretty quickly, but CamContacts has stuck with a single title called Strip HiLo, and it's pretty cool, all things considered. 

The idea is simple: you're given a card against the performer and have to decide whether the next one will be higher or lower. If you win, they take off a specific item of clothing. We played this with a performer and she jumped straight into it, more than happy to abide by the game's results.

Our resident reviewer is a poker addict and didn't realise that Ace would be low: we lost the first round, but now you're ready to go forth and dominate with this key piece of information. 

We actually like Strip HiLo: it's a unique feature and the best example of a functioning game that we've seen from any cam site.

Special Events

There's a special events tab where various happenings happen. 

There are prizes given out to models and users alike for their participation, and it's generally simple stuff like doing a small puzzle game with camgirls. 

The numbers involved are actually pretty crazy: there have been several over the years with over $100,000 in prizes. Every year, there's one for Valentine's Day and then again for the site's birthday (around the start of November).

Action-to-Spend

2

We can't give a high score here: in fact, it's one of the 'worst' in the industry if we look at it from the perspective of how far you can go with your money. 

Sure, a few striptease shows for $1 per minute are acceptable, but the lack of free samples and public shows really makes it hard for this hub to compete well against the likes of Chaturbate and StripChat. There aren't even prepaid events that some other services have. At the very least, allow group shows in some capacity so people can get a bargain.

Payment Options

4

When you sign up, you'll have to hand over your credit card details. 

All payments are settled in USD, so if you're using a card that utilizes a different currency, expect to pay a little extra because of the exchange rate. The website is a sort of pay-as-you-go service: every $20 to $50 you spend, your card will be charged retroactively. There's no way to get a discount with coins or tokens or anything: it's all settled in fiat currency.

There are no other payment methods available: you'll need a Visa or MasterCard to pay for your time at CamContacts. We dislike this: at the very least, you should be able to preload cryptocurrency or link a PayPal account.

Refund Policy

From the website's Terms & Conditions:

Refund & Cancellation Policy.

If You have any complaint about Our Services then please contact Us using the details provided on the "Contact Us" page to let Us know the nature of Your complaint. We will consider your complaint quickly, carefully and reasonably, and if it’s appropriate we will make a refund to your payment card in respect of the value of the Services affected.

It's nice that they don't say "sorry, no refunds" outright. This is the way cam sites should operate. If you have a genuine issue, see if they can help.

Discreet Billing

When we made a purchase, here's what our bank reported to us:

No immediate alarm bells from the title alone, but if anyone Googled that phrase, they'd find the following: "[COMPANY] is the leader in developing and managing LIVE VIDEO CHAT and PAY PER PERFORMANCE technologies.", among other incriminating evidence.

We think it's fair to say that CamContacts' billing is only semi-discreet.

CamsRank on CamContacts

Our immediate concerns are an outdated model of access that always requires payment, no support for interactive sex toys, multiple complex categories and a comparatively small roster of talent.

CamContacts is functional, and there are a few nice things here, but the camming world is incredibly competitive, and it's not good enough just to be good.

Highlights include the embedded stripping game, lower-than-average private show costs, free cam-to-cam sessions and clear communication regarding payment rates. They also have some nice Asian trans girls, so if that's your cam niche of choice, you'll be golden.

For most readers, there are at least a dozen alternatives we'd point you towards before suggesting CamContacts as your go-to for live sex cams.