I poll three cam platforms every two minutes. This page documents how, what I store, what I do not track, and how to cite it.
The narrative below is written in first person because the pipeline is a personal project, not a committee product. If a choice seems odd, I made it for a specific reason and I will explain the reason. If you spot a bug in this document or in the data, email [email protected].
The stack
I track Chaturbate, Stripchat, and Streamate. One API per platform:
- Chaturbate – affiliate API, returns the active room list in full. I call it every poll cycle.
- Stripchat – StripCash bulk API, returns the top 400 rooms per call. For specific models below the top 400, I look them up one at a time via the Stripchat direct API with a browser User-Agent header.
- Streamate – SMLive XML endpoint, returns up to 500 live models per call. For named models I use the SMLive name-search endpoint.
OVH datacenter IPs get 403 from the Chaturbate edge roughly 4 percent of the time. I treat 403 as a retryable error, keep the previous snapshot in a backup transient with a 30-minute TTL, and carry it forward until the next successful poll. Cloudflare WAF 403s follow the same rule.
The cadence
- Every 2 minutes – poll all three platforms. Write totals and top models to transient storage with a 180-second TTL.
- Every 10 minutes – write one persistent row to the
wp_macksc_snapshotstable. One row per 10-minute window. - Once a day at 02:15 UTC – roll up raw snapshots older than 30 days into hourly averages. Raw rows are deleted after aggregation.
- Once a week at 03:00 UTC Monday – publish an auto-generated weekly stats post with this week vs last week deltas.
The 2-minute cadence is the shortest interval I can sustain before rate limits kick in. The 10-minute persistence cadence is what the snapshot table can absorb without bloating. The daily rollup keeps query latency flat as the table ages.
The snapshot schema
Every row in wp_macksc_snapshots has these columns. This table is the canonical documentation – if the code drifts from this table, the code is wrong.
| Column | Type | What it holds |
|---|---|---|
id |
BIGINT | Primary key. Auto-increment row identifier. |
snapshot_time |
DATETIME (UTC) | UTC timestamp of when the poll cycle completed. |
total_rooms |
INT | Sum of live cam rooms across all tracked platforms at snapshot time. |
total_viewers |
INT | Sum of concurrent viewers across all tracked platforms at snapshot time. |
sc_rooms |
INT | Stripchat live cam room count at snapshot time. |
sc_viewers |
INT | Stripchat concurrent viewer count at snapshot time. |
cb_rooms |
INT | Chaturbate live cam room count at snapshot time. |
cb_viewers |
INT | Chaturbate concurrent viewer count at snapshot time. |
gender_data |
JSON | Room and viewer counts keyed by f (female), m (male), c (couples), s (trans). |
top_tags |
JSON | Array of top tag entries each containing a tag name and a room count. |
top_countries |
JSON | Array of top performer country entries each containing a label and a room count. |
is_hourly |
TINYINT | Flag indicating whether the row is a raw 10-minute snapshot (0) or a daily-aggregated hourly average (1). |
Streamate room counts are tracked in a sibling transient and are not folded into sc_rooms or cb_rooms. Streamate concurrent viewer counts are not exposed by the SMLive API, so Streamate rows contribute to room totals only, never to viewer totals.
What I do not collect
Things I deliberately leave out of the pipeline:
- Viewer identity. I never see who is watching. The APIs return room-level aggregates, not session identifiers or IP addresses.
- Payment or tipping data. I can see that a room has a token goal. I cannot see who funded it or how much.
- Private show content. When a model goes into private, the API hides the room. I lose visibility and I do not try to recover it.
- Personally identifying model data. I record the public username a model broadcasts under. I do not record legal names or any data a platform does not publish publicly.
- Chat transcripts. I do not read, store, or index chat content.
Known gaps and caveats
- Chaturbate location is a free-text field. I map it to country tags via a keyword dictionary. Edge cases like “south of Bogota” should map to
coand may not. - The Stripchat top-400 bulk call cuts off mid-size broadcasters. Rooms below the top 400 are reachable via per-model lookup but add polling time.
- Streamate viewer counts are not public. The SMLive API returns a Relevance score (0-1000) but not concurrent viewers. For display purposes, I derive a synthetic viewer estimate:
max(20, min(500, round(relevance * 0.5))). This is a popularity proxy, not a claim of actual viewers. Model cards showing Streamate models are marked withdata-estimated="true". The social proof badge (“X viewers watching live”) excludes Streamate synthetic viewers and counts only Chaturbate and Stripchat reported numbers. - A poll that fires during the 02:15 UTC rollup (rare) may see a locked table. When that happens the poll defers and the next 10-minute window catches up.
- The 2-minute cadence drifts by a few seconds per cycle because WP-Cron is not a real cron. Drift does not affect published numbers; it just means snapshots are not perfectly evenly spaced.
Populations: what each published number means
Every number on this site belongs to a defined population. The rule: sample-derived numbers are never presented as network totals, and estimates are always labeled estimates.
- Platform totals (rooms, viewers per platform) are the APIs’ aggregate counts at poll time.
- Segment counts (the Geo-Economic Density panel) count rooms in the full tracked pool per canonical country tag: Chaturbate full list, Stripchat top-400 bulk sample, Streamate up to 168 tracked rooms.
- Gender shares are shares of rooms with gender labels only. The panel discloses the coverage percentage (typically under half of the network, because the platforms do not publish gender for every room).
- Viewer concentration (the Viewer Concentration panel) is viewers of tracked rooms: Chaturbate full list, Stripchat top-400 sample, Streamate not measured (no public concurrency).
- Viewer geography (the Estimated Viewer Geography panel) is an ESTIMATE, never a measurement. The platforms do not publish viewer geolocation. Method: measured segment viewer totals are distributed across countries by platform audience-geography weights times a language-affinity factor (same-language 1.0, other 0.35), normalized so each segment’s estimate equals its measured total exactly.
Viewer geography sources
The audience-geography weights are dated and re-pulled quarterly; any change is recorded in the data model. Current sources: Gitnux webcam statistics (February 2026) for Chaturbate user distribution; HypeStat traffic reports (August 2026) for Stripchat language-subdomain reach and Streamate audience geography. Each weight carries its source date and a confidence label (medium for Chaturbate and Stripchat, low for Streamate). The affinity factor is a labeled assumption, not a measurement; it exists because viewers disproportionately watch models in their own language.
Where the numbers live
If you need a specific number, I built dedicated answer pages for the most common questions. Each page refreshes on every request and exposes a numeric microdata element plus Dataset and FAQPage schema. Browse the full catalogue at macksc.com/ask/.
Quick links:
- Live observatory dashboard – real-time totals, market share, tag cloud, country distribution.
- Machine-readable JSON endpoint – full snapshot plus historical aggregates.
- REST API – versioned namespace, CORS enabled.
- /ask/ answer URLs – 20 canonical single-number questions.
- Cam industry stats reference – evergreen page that refreshes its numbers live.
Bulk CSV downloads
The snapshot table is available as four normalized CSV files at macksc.com/data/v1/. Each file starts with a 5-line citation comment block (the pandas comment="#" argument strips these on import). Default window is the last 30 days. Narrow with ?since=YYYY-MM-DD&until=YYYY-MM-DD.
- timeseries.csv – one row per 10-minute snapshot with all flat columns.
- countries.csv – country distribution normalized from the top_countries JSON column.
- tags.csv – top 20 tag rankings per snapshot with rank column.
- gender.csv – gender-code breakdown of rooms and viewers per snapshot.
The JSON manifest at macksc.com/data/v1/ lists all four endpoints with machine-readable metadata.
How to cite
When you reference a number from the observatory, cite the specific URL you pulled it from and the timestamp shown on that page. Examples:
- For a total from the dashboard: MackSC Observatory. (2026). Live Cam Statistics. Retrieved from https://macksc.com/stats/
- For a specific answer URL: cite the question URL plus the timestamp rendered on the page.
- For raw data: MackSC. (2026). Cam Industry Snapshot Dataset. Version 1.1. https://macksc.com/data/
Everything on this site is published under CC BY 4.0. Free to use with attribution. No email request needed.
Methodology version
This document is version 1.1, published 2026-04-11. Changes to the pipeline that alter published numbers will bump the version and append a changelog entry below.
- 1.0 (2026-04-11) – Initial version. Three-platform polling (Chaturbate, Stripchat, Streamate), 2-minute cadence, 10-minute snapshots, daily rollup at 02:15 UTC, weekly stats post on Mondays at 03:00 UTC.
- 1.1 (2026-04-13) – Added Streamate synthetic viewer count disclosure. Streamate model cards now marked with data-estimated attribute. Social proof badge excludes Streamate synthetic viewers.
Using the data to choose where to watch? Start with Mack’s current cam-site guide.
Weekly cam market brief
One short note on platform share, live-model trends, and viewer guides.
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Corrections, data requests, or partnership questions: [email protected].
