914.06
/ 1000
As of . Recomputed on every 10-minute snapshot.
The LIGHT Index is a single number that tells me how healthy the live cam industry is right now on a 0-1000 scale. It combines 5 weighted components: room count normalized against a 30-day ceiling, viewer count normalized the same way, 7-day velocity, platform diversity, and tag entropy. I recompute it on every 10-minute snapshot write.
Components
| Component | Weight | Value (0..1) | Contribution |
|---|---|---|---|
| Normalized room count (R_norm) | 40% | 0.984 | 393.60 |
| Normalized viewer count (V_norm) | 40% | 0.944 | 377.56 |
| Velocity (7-day sigmoid) | 10% | 0.464 | 46.43 |
| Platform diversity (1 – HHI) | 5% | 0.998 | 49.92 |
| Tag entropy (normalized Shannon) | 5% | 0.931 | 46.57 |
How the LIGHT Index is computed
The formula is:
score = 1000 * ( 0.40 * R_norm + 0.40 * V_norm + 0.10 * velocity + 0.05 * diversity + 0.05 * entropy )Each component is normalized to [0, 1] before weighting so the final score lands cleanly in [0, 1000].
- R_norm – current total rooms divided by the 95th percentile of total rooms over the past 30 days. Clipped to [0, 1]. A record-high day touches 1.0; a quiet day sits around 0.6.
- V_norm – same pattern on concurrent viewers.
- velocity – sigmoid of the fractional change between the last 24-hour mean viewer count and the prior 7-day mean. 0.5 is neutral, above 0.5 is growing, below 0.5 is shrinking. I use a sigmoid rather than raw percent so that huge spikes do not dominate the score.
- diversity – 1 minus the normalized Herfindahl-Hirschman index on Chaturbate vs Stripchat room share. 0 means one platform owns everything; 1 means perfect equal share. I exclude Streamate from this component because Streamate viewer counts are not public via API and Streamate room counts are tracked separately.
- entropy – normalized Shannon entropy across the top 20 tags of the latest snapshot. 0 means one tag dominates; 1 means the top 20 are perfectly uniform. This picks up niche saturation and promotional pushes.
Full methodology for the underlying pipeline: macksc.com/methodology/.
Machine-readable endpoints
/wp-json/macksc/v1/light– current reading as JSON./wp-json/macksc/v1/light/history?days=30– historical time series as JSON./wp-json/macksc/v1/light/close?date=YYYY-MM-DD– daily close lookup for a specific date.
All endpoints return CC BY 4.0 data with CORS enabled. Free to cite with attribution.
Cite this reading
MackSC. (2026). LIGHT Index (Live Industry Global Heat Tracker). Retrieved April 15, 2026 from https://macksc.com/light/. Score on retrieval: 914.06/1000.
See the live observatory for the raw totals this score is built from. Read the full methodology. Browse the canonical answer URLs for specific numbers.