Sex in the Gig Economy: The Tyranny & Opportunity of Online Platforms for Independent Escorts
In a marked change from 20th century commercial sex, in the United States today street prostitutes constitute a small minority of sex workers, and online escorts operating either independently or in association with agencies constitute the main suppliers of direct inter-personal sexual commerce outside of exotic dance. Contemporary American escorts, whether working independently or with an agency, recruit clients almost exclusively through the internet. Although most escort agencies and elite independent escorts operate their own webpages, many of which may be found through Google, our research indicates that a vast majority of web traffic for escorts comes through a small number of web-based platforms. The most popular of these is backpage.com, where inexpensive ads can be placed much like Craigslist. Nearly as popular is The Erotic Review (TER), a site where paid member consumers known as “hobbyists” compile information on escorts and post reviews of their experiences with them. Escorts can also advertise themselves and their services via TER. The other major platforms for escort marketing are Eros.com, which offers more premium looking advertisements than Backpage.com but lacks reviews, and Preffered411.com (P411), which provides verification services for clients and provider members as well as offering premium profile pages like those of Eros.com. For each of these four types of escort web platforms there are several less popular competitors, but none offer qualitatively different services.
We explore the role of these four web platforms in the escort industry by considering elite escorts’ marketing decisions through the lens of entrepreneurship. The reason for doing so is that these independent, elite escorts are erotic entrepreneurs ---- business women who work independently, flexibly, online, and strategically to maximize their profits and minimize drawbacks of their work. Drawing upon content analyses of these platforms, as well as survey and interview data collected from Independent online escorts who utilize these various sites, we illustrate how each platform, as well as escorts’ own individual websites, enable different approaches to advertising and as a result, influence the way the escorts’ work, the market position of their clients, and the relationship between the two.
With the exception of TER, independent escorts with their own professional websites are able to take advantage of the benefits of each of these different platforms without being effected by their limitations. For example, Backpage.com is a platform easily accessible for creating ads that require minimal investment. Professional photographs are not expected, and it's easy to build an ad; this therefore offers an opportunity for escorts to test a variety of marketing strategies with a minimal investment of time and money. Eros.com offers a more standardized format which can be made to look professional with a single professional photograph. It may help providers to reach more lucrative niches than with Backpage.com but still at a minimized financial and time investment. P411 mirrors Eros.com in the appearance of the profiles providers can post there but they provide an added service of client verification which means that those who create and maintain P411 profiles increase their chances of receiving traffic from more avid hobbyists who go to the trouble of establishing verification accounts. TER on the other hand is unique in relation to these other services in that its profiles are often times not even created by the provider but rather by former clients, which limits the provider’s control over the information presented there such as age, body measurements and most importantly, reviews.
Although all of these platforms frequently link to one another, compounding visibility for those who choose to utilize all of them, TER is exceptional in that they ban escorts who discourage clients from posting on review sites. Given TER’s partial reliance on memberships for revenue, and that the principle attraction of membership is the ability to read and write escort reviews, their policy is a strategic financial one. The problem as some escorts see it is that reviews place the intimate details of client-provider interactions into near public view. Presently this places escorts who would prefer not to be reviewed in a particularly difficult predicament because not only does actively opposing client reviews diminish their business when they have to turn down reviewer clients, TER’s dominance as the platform of choice for most clients results in a significant loss of traffic to their independent site. In short, platforms and platform policies matter.
This paper presents an assessment of the tyrannies and opportunities associated with different platforms for escorts, and ideas for better platforms that would meet their market-driven needs for visibility, strategic marketing, discretion, and safety. These are key demands for many sectors in the gig economy, and the escort market niche is no different in this regard. Where elite escorts do differ from many other independent contractors in the adult gig economy is in the autonomy they enjoy compared to exotic dancers, brothel workers, and many other independent contractors who nonetheless lack full independence. Further we consider the ways this autonomy fundamentally transforms the provider-client relationship. With the explosive expansion of online markets --especially sexual markets-- in the sharing and gig economies, the adult sector becomes an important site for analysis of platforms and the techno-social context that shapes and influences these intimate exchanges.