Cams.com was formerly owned by Lensman of Adult.com but was put up for auction, and, according to Lars, his company purchased the domain for around the same amount of money needed to purchase a large home.
"This was a very large, pricey acquisition," Lars told XBiz. "The bottom line is it's a very brandable site and we feel it was necessary to take us to the next level, which is to become the No. 1 live web cam affiliate program on the web."
The Streamray family runs a network of more than 5,000 co-branded cam sites, each of which feature up to 100 models at a time. If the customer wants the model to get nude, then the billing begins at a per-minute rate. Lars entered the live web cam sector in 1998 and has been building up his holdings at a steady rate ever since.
"It was a rough struggle at the beginning with a lot of learning curves," Lars told XBiz. "The technology wasn't really there and people were still on modems. At the time, we were pushing in a direction where no one else had really gone. We were really frontiersmen."
According to Lars, the acquisition was finalized this week and his plans are to re-brand his entire product around Cams.com as his flagship site. Lars said that formerly CamGirlsLive.com was his flagship site, but that customers and friends had difficulty remembering the URL.
In the coming months, Lars expects Streamray to implement payout changes, new model programs, customer retention programs and webmaster tools.
"In the last years, we've seen up to ten times the competition come into the cam marketplace than before and it's extremely robust," Lars said. "We've had a record year so far and we're blowing everything out of the water. We haven't even begun to penetrate the market."
For the month of January, Streamray will be offering $70 payouts on Cams.com and all other $1 join sites.