Ten years ago, Bella French found herself in dire straits.

The 27-year-old French-Canadian had just earned a degree from the prestigious business school HEC Montréal , where she studied marketing and logistics, and decided it was time to take a big swing. She maxed out her credit cards, took out small business loans, and borrowed against her father’s line of credit. In all French raised $250,000, which she used to open a clothing store featuring her own streetwear line. Then disaster struck.

“Basically, eight months after the opening I walked into the store and the whole place was flooded,” she recalls.

A hot water tank in the apartment above it had burst, leaving the store submerged. If that weren’t enough, since French had only insured it for up to $50,000, she found herself $200,000 in debt.

She frantically looked for fashion work in her native Montreal but came up empty. Then her best friend, Hamed Seoleghi, suggested something a bit out of left field: “He says, ‘Have you ever heard of webcamming?’” remembers French. “My friend makes about $5,000 every month.”

French, who had never dabbled in sex work—and didn’t even watch porn—was aghast at the idea. “I couldn’t believe that my friend would recommend that I become a camgirl,” she says. “I told him, ‘You’re crazy! I would never do that. I’m so much better than all those girls. Those are girls that can’t do anything else’—basically, the way people tend to judge sex workers.”

Two weeks later, with her financial situation stretched to the breaking point, she created a profile on a cam site. To her surprise, she loved it. “I realized that I was so wrong to think all the things I thought about camgirls before I became one, because it was not at all the reality of what it is to become a camgirl or a sex worker.”

“I had a hard time being comfortable naked or accepting my body, and becoming a camgirl almost forced me to become comfortable with who I am,” explain French. “I became extremely comfortable with my own sexuality, and that was incredibly empowering. To this day, I feel so much stronger as a woman because of it. I also became more understanding of people’s struggles and to never judge anyone, because you really don’t know why they are where they are in life. There are a lot of extremely smart people in this industry and they do this line of work because it’s what they want to do. They’re not victims.”

The money wasn’t bad either. In her first month of camming, working five days a week and up to six hours a day, she pulled in $6,000; in her last month, working seven days a week and up to twelve hours a day, she says she netted $42,000. “As a camgirl, if you want to stay on top and be top-ranked on a website, you have to be online almost all the time. It became completely my life,” she says. “I wasn’t really going outside much anymore. I would just work out and cam.”

French was a top-rated camgirl from 2011 to 2014. She initially envisioned doing it for a year or two, paying off her debts, and leaving the adult industry with her anonymity intact. But that plan soon went out the window. “Within the first month, someone recorded one of my shows and put it up on a tube site. I was devastated; I had no idea I was being filmed,” she says. “So tube sites are not just harming companies and performers and taking money from their own earnings, it’s literally hurting people’s privacy. What if you wanted to be a cam girl when you were 20, and you’re now 25 and want to go to law school, but now it’s a problem because people have stolen your content and uploaded it on a tube site?”

“ Within the first month, someone recorded one of my shows and put it up on a tube site. I was devastated; I had no idea I was being filmed. ”

Most of the popular XXX tube sites are controlled by MindGeek, a Montreal-headquartered company with a stranglehold on adult content. In addition to owning Pornhub, YouPorn, RedTube, GayTube, PornMD, PornIQ, and Tube8, they also operate several large-scale porn production studios such as Brazzers, Digital Playground, Reality Kings, Twistys, and Wicked Pictures, thereby wielding enormous power in presiding over production and distribution. Since tube sites largely thrive on ripped content, and performers in those porn clips don’t see a dime despite the millions of views they rack up, MindGeek is having it both ways—employing adult performers while screwing them over on the back-end.

“It’s enraging how there are tube sites out there generating millions from stolen content,” offers French. “It’s this really fucked-up relationship that a lot of performers have with MindGeek. I understand where they’re coming from, because they’re paying them to shoot videos and it’s helping their career, but at the same time, do you also realize that because of them you’re being paid three times less than you would have before, and that people don’t really buy a subscription to your website because they have all your content for free on a tube site now?”

She sighs. “I try to educate my community so that they realize if we all come together, we can let giant companies like MindGeek know that this shouldn’t happen anymore. If we boycotted all their studios, they would have no choice but to adapt—and the industry would move in the right direction.”

In lieu of an industry-wide boycott, French came up with an idea for a performer-friendly adult clips site—one that featured original content and provided substantial residuals to performers. She called it ManyVids, and the site was official launched in April 2014, with French serving as CEO, her pal (and now boyfriend) Hamed Seoleghi installed as COO, and her other buddy Jean-Noel Sciretta as CTO. Like MindGeek, the company is based in Montreal.

“ It’s basically a mix between Amazon, YouTube and Twitter,” French says of ManyVids. “We call our performers MVStars, and if you’re an MVStar, you can create a profile on ManyVids and sell videos, physical goods, memberships, generate private fundraising campaigns, a private mailing list, you name it. And we also have live camming. You will always keep the rights to your content—the content does not belong to the platform—so you can upload and delete whatever you want. If you want to delete your profile, we respect that.”

According to French, performers receive “eighty percent of the transaction” for things like physical goods, “sixty percent of the transaction” for videos, and “fifty percent of the transaction” for camming, which are industry highs. Top earners on ManyVids can generate between $20,000-30,000 a month, French claims. The website is also ad-free, because they want “the website to be all about the models.”

A 2019 media kit for ManyVids boasts of 2.4 million members, 64 million monthly page views, and 300,000 unique visitors a day. It bills itself as “the fastest-growing clip site in the world.”

On top of ManyVids, the site operates a blog, podcast, and online magazine featuring its top models; a tube site, MVTube, where performers receive “67 cents per 1,000 views”; and MVSocial, a Twitter-esque social network where sex workers have “no fear of their accounts being shut down.” They’ve also partnered with a number of pro-sex-worker organizations, including Sex Workers Outreach Project USA and Amber Rose’s SlutWalk. The company employees 120 workers, and is moving into a bigger office space to account for its growth.

“We try to offer sex workers the tools to be more successful as independent entrepreneurs without being judged,” says French. “What was really important for me was to educate the world and make them realize that porn stars are not stupid.”

“And you know, becoming a camgirl is the biggest gift I’ve ever received,” she adds. “I thank god that this whole situation happened with the flood and the store and all that.”