Elsewhere on the site, a girl who used to earn minimum wage serving microwaved beef burgers to customers who never said thank you now has an Instagram fan page dedicated to the way she jiggles her ass in cake frosting. Not only does she work from home, but from the comfort of her own bed. Another girl is studying Psychology at university. Prior to camming, she was forced to eat lettuce sandwiches while waiting for the next instalment of her student loan to come through. She just sold a dirty Primark thong for £30. She's basically getting paid to not do her laundry.

Somewhere on LiveJasmin, My Free Cams or Chaturbate, there is a girl in a bubblegum pink sex harness getting paid £10 to rub a balloon over her foot because some guy with a fetish begged her to. She doesn't have to look at his cum face – wrinkled like a cat's asshole – because he didn't spend the extra money required to turn his webcam on.

All in all, being a cam girl sounds easy, but the hardest part isn't coming to terms with the idea of livestreaming your thigh cellulite – it's the constant physical and emotional demands. To make a living, cam girls work anything from three to 12 hours a day, but success requires consistency.

I spoke to Miss Dammer, a former cam girl now working as an escort, who used to be one of the top ten girls on My Free Cams, where she was making over £20,000 a month. "These guys are always online; if you're not there one day, they could visit another girl's page and you could lose a high paying client," she tells me. Excitement soon gave way to anxiety as Miss Dammer became aware that her success depended on constant releases: "I stayed online for 24 hours once. I managed to go a year-and-a-half without taking a day off."

It's not simply the frequency of content creation that leads to burnout. It's the nature of the work required to keep audiences interested. The more you move, the more likely you are to grab the client's attention as they scroll glassy-eyed through the home page. "I never had a chair in my room; I would put my computer on the end of my bed and keep moving, people could tip me to do a fashion show, or a chicken dance, the Macarena," says Miss Dammer. "I pretended to take shots of vodka but the bottle was actually filled with water. I never had to work out because I burned so many calories. Camming gave me back problems – I had crooked feet from high heels, my eyes would sting because I was under photographic lighting."

Couples who cam together face something uniquely tiring. While solo cammers can fake orgasms, couples are expected to have sex – something you can't really simulate. High school sweethearts Jaxx and Bunny started camming together when they needed money. After leaving a student apartment complex which cost them $1,000 (£759) for a 500 square ft bedroom, they endured a brief stint sleeping in a tent in the woods before eventually turning to camming – a profession that allows them to live in a lovely home and support their nine-month-old baby. "We have sex for around six hours a day," says Bunny. When ask if it ever gets painful, she says: "If I’m getting tired and I need a break, I just give him head. People love watching me do that."