Oh some asian cam sites I know well, wrote here.
I can gossip here that some cam script vendors joked with me about 99% of their customers being wanna-be cam pimp's, often former customers, who will invest $3k to $7k in the software, contact the models they know (from paying them per minute before), then having no $$ for advertising or clue how to run it all. So 99% of the sales of those cam script vendor is from licenses of sites that will fail, where 1% it is sites who stay up, that's actual gossip from talking them, not a joke. The cam script vendor know the guy ill fail but he sell the license and that's fine, if the cam site fail (as it should) that's not the fault of cam script vendor
I agree with the million dollar cash to start a cam site, this was said in another thread time ago. Maybe it is possible with $500,000 but needs be smart really and to pre-own something (software, customers list or else) to cheat a little.
Consider you need to have sales of $3k to $5k per day to keep a cam site up barely with 20-30 (not all philipino or colombian) models online (at same time, so db of few 100's) and happy. If you want 200 happy (from db of 1000+) calculate 5-10 times the sales, and so on. Running a cam site is like run a bank, move lots $$ and make a small % on it.
When you start a site it have zero customer and 20-30 models who will write in forums after few datys that your site has no traffic and it sucks (whatever your software is good and you pay then big %), so the first weeks you need to spend like $10,000 a day in adverts to keep some reputation, and it will convert worst then developed big sites, so it will be a big money burning for a while, no way you make profit at start.
Note that you cna't hope in traffic from affiliates, they'll stick with big cam sites at the start, so you'll have to buy brute force with dollars to traffic agencies and brokers.
As someone said, most new cam sites consume all the advertising money before to reach the critical mass - and without such a minimum, the models quit and the members too, it is a disaster, unlikely photo sites where the content do not "quit" your pages and keeps there... in cam sites it is same as your member area gets deleted, formatted.
About hire the cam guru who is experienced in all areas, these are who run cam sites today and so not available really, why a cam guru should be unemployed or without an own cam site, I wonder?
I would then consider merge and acquisition, so to buy one or two small cam sites and hire its mini-me cam guru's & models / users db's to consolidate into a bigger cam site, this would retain (inherit) contacts and proven stuff and people into the venture, and customers base.
Lately a few failed cam programs was acquired either by streamray or myfreecams, now you go to their url's and brings to streamray and myfreecams, and their customers and models moved there too, as possible. Well this is not the case wel talk about, it is the old big site who eat the small ones, we talk of new one who eat small ones for a new big site... but well, there's not many small cam sites who are so active despite small, and for example I would not sell or merge my site with others (as mine site goes well, why I should share?), same could be for others, so the choice of merge & acquisition may be small - and probably best ones was already purchased by i.e. streamray, mfc etc.
Said so, there's no one (that I know of) putting 1+ million in a new cam site in past 2 years - I know of some $100k people (who did not succeeded imho), so it could be if someone actually put such money and buy also 1 or 2 small cam sites to consolidate, it could kick ass, or alternatively will burn 1+ million making good biz for advertising sellers and a few models for a while.