State of Cams: May 2026
May 2026 averaged 18,046 live cam rooms and 461,209 concurrent viewers across Chaturbate and Stripchat. Rooms -1.4% month-over-month. Viewers -1.7% month-over-month. Peak concurrent viewership hit 600,546. This report was auto-generated from 853 snapshot samples.
Headline metrics
| Metric | Value | Month-over-month |
|---|---|---|
| Avg live rooms | 18,046 | -1.4% |
| Avg concurrent viewers | 461,209 | -1.7% |
| Peak viewership | 600,546 | – |
| Trough viewership | 244,448 | – |
| LIGHT Index avg | 742.5 / 1000 | – |
| LIGHT Index peak | 942.2 / 1000 | – |
Platform split
| Platform | Avg rooms | Avg concurrent viewers |
|---|---|---|
| Stripchat | 8,626 | 92,483 |
| Chaturbate | 7,676 | 368,725 |
Streamate viewer counts are not exposed by the SMLive API and are not included in viewer totals. See the methodology page for the full polling stack.
Top performer countries
The top 10 cam performer countries this month by live room count. Rankings reflect the latest snapshot captured before the report was generated.
| Rank | Country | Live rooms |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Colombia | 12 |
| 2 | Colombian | 9 |
| 3 | United states | 6 |
| 4 | Antioquia, colombia | 6 |
| 5 | German | 5 |
| 6 | American | 5 |
| 7 | Japanese | 3 |
| 8 | Venezuelan | 3 |
| 9 | British | 2 |
| 10 | Tennessee, united states | 2 |
Top 15 cam tags
The 15 most-used tags across all live broadcasters this month, by performer count.
| Rank | Tag | Performers |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | lovense | 82 |
| 2 | hd | 73 |
| 3 | mobile | 46 |
| 4 | couple | 43 |
| 5 | female | 39 |
| 6 | colombian | 31 |
| 7 | bigcock | 31 |
| 8 | american | 29 |
| 9 | cum | 24 |
| 10 | trans | 20 |
| 11 | young | 15 |
| 12 | 18 | 14 |
| 13 | anal | 14 |
| 14 | feet | 11 |
| 15 | bigass | 10 |
What the numbers say
Observations drawn directly from this month of data:
- Average viewers per room: 25.6. This is a rough proxy for audience concentration in any given room at any given moment.
- Stripchat carried more live rooms on average than Chaturbate this month. See platform share for the live split.
- Chaturbate pulled more concurrent viewers than Stripchat, consistent with its historically higher viewers-per-room ratio.
- The LIGHT Index averaged 742.5 and peaked at 942.2 this month. The index is a composite 0-1000 health score for the live cam industry.
How this report is generated
This report is written automatically from the wp_macksc_snapshots table on the 1st of every month at 04:00 UTC. The polling pipeline behind the data is documented at macksc.com/methodology/. The report template is a PHP function; no LLM is involved in writing the prose.
All numbers in this document are point-in-time averages over the reporting month. Month-over-month deltas compare this month average to last month average. The top countries and tags are from the last snapshot of the month to avoid heavy per-snapshot aggregation.
Cite this report
This report is published under CC BY 4.0. Free to cite with attribution.
MackSC. (2026). State of Cams: May 2026. https://macksc.com/state-of-cams-2026-05/
For citation formats in BibTeX, RIS, APA, MLA, Chicago, and Harvard, see macksc.com/cite/.
Related data
- Live observatory dashboard – real-time totals updated every 2 minutes.
- LIGHT Index – composite 0-1000 health score recomputed on every 10-minute snapshot.
- Machine-readable CSV exports – raw snapshot data for the reporting month.
- Canonical answer URLs – per-question live answer pages.
- All State of Cams reports – monthly archive.
