Let’s say you are someone who is new to selling sex, who decides to start using online escorting websites to advertise your services. Your current income isn’t enough to support yourself on and you’ve done a small amount of sex work to bridge the gap, selling some pictures of yourself and seeing a couple of clients that you’ve made informal agreements with around trading sex for things you need.
To work safely, you know that you should use a secondary phone. Lucky you, before you fell on hard times you upgraded your phone as a part of your contract and kept the old one. All you need to do is purchase a SIM card and a plan – you opt for the cheapest one with enough calls and texts that you can cancel at any time, which costs you £6 per month.
With your sex work phone all set up, you create your profile. From some research on Google, you discover that Adultwork is one of the most popular escorting sites where you’re likely to get the most traffic. It takes a few days to verify, during which time you familiarize yourself with the charges on the site. It will cost you £2 per day to have your phone number be visible for clients to contact you and another £5 per day to mark yourself as being available.
You start advertising and realize that Adultwork has recently introduced a charge of £4.99 to change your location, which you hadn’t read about. Since you can’t work from your home, because you live in a building with housemates who would never accept it, you were planning to work from hotels and different areas depending on the demand and which places you can book inexpensively. You decide you’ll plan the places you’ll use to see clients far in advance, so you can minimize location changes, and tell yourself that you’ll only change it a couple of times per month.
Clients don’t come rolling in. You manage to get some, though most of the people who contact you are time-wasters. It isn’t worth booking hotels in advance, because you might not find yourself with any clients that day, so you can only justify paying for one after you already have a client confirmed. Once you have one, you try to find more to see on that same day, because for a booking of only an hour you barely earn anything past the cost of the room. You try to encourage clients to book multiple hours, but you don’t always succeed. You end up changing your location once you book a hotel, to wherever it is, and they’re often in different areas because you have to book them based on where the client wants to meet you.
To improve your chances of getting multiple bookings in a day, once you have one confirmed and have booked a hotel, you start to feature your profile. It costs you between £20 and £30 each time you do it, and it does increase the number on inquiries you get by a lot. You’re more likely to get a second or third client who you can see in the same room you booked, though it’s still not a guarantee.
Once you’ve been on the site for a little while, you stop being new. The hobbyists who want to try out the new people have stopped booking you and you still aren’t earning enough to meet all your needs. You branch out, creating profiles on several different sites. Each site you add yourself to has paid membership options or ways to promote your profile. You can’t know which ones will bring you clients, so you try a few of them. You pay £35 for a month’s membership to one, £50 for a week of placing an advertisement on another, and you create several profiles on sites which allow you to use them for free with the most basic functions.
Advertising in more places brings you more clients, however they don’t usually announce which website they found you from and it can be hard to tell. From asking clients, at the risk of putting them off with business talk, you discover that most of your additional clients have come from the site you’re paying £50 per week for. You get more than one client per week, though you still have the problem that you barely break even on the hotel if the client doesn’t book an outcall, unless you get 2 clients or more for the same say. It isn’t viable for you to only use the second website; you need to use both.
You also create your own website, using a free website builder. It’s very simple but it works well enough. Unfortunately, you don’t get much traction on it, because the only people who come across it are those who are looking at your social media like Twitter or Reddit or wherever else you link it. Your social media accounts are often deleted, so you have to start over a lot.
After a couple of months selling sex, you decide to do the math on how much you’re spending and earning. As you’re poor enough to need to spend everything you make, it’s not clear to you how much of the money coming in is profit.
How much are you spending on advertising?
You spend £200 per month advertising on Vivastreet, to have your advert running. For Adultwork, you have to add up the charges. You mark yourself as available for 20 days out of 30 in the month, though you don’t work for all of those days, to get yourself seen by clients (20 x £5 = £100). You display your number every day (30 x £2 = £60). You end up needing to change your location 5 times per month (5 x £5 = £25). You feature your profile 4 times a month, because it is expensive and feels like a gamble (4 x £25 = £100). Between Vivastreet and Adultwork, you spend £485 per month with your routine. Then another £6 for your phone contract. Your first month, you spend an additional £35 from trying out a membership to another site.
With difficulty from constantly messaging clients, you manage to see 10 clients a month on average. In one month, the breakdown is as follows: 2 clients in a hotel on the same night, 3 clients on a different night, 3 clients as outcalls, 2 clients in hotels where they were your only client that night. Out of these 10 clients, only 2 of them pay for more than an hour of your time. Both book you for 2 hours.
You are charging £110 per hour, which is a fairly competitive rate for your area. You earn a total of £1320 from your clients. You spend £320 on hotels and £60 on travel.
£1320 – £485 – £320 – £60 – £6 = £449.
Seeing 10 clients, spending dozens of hours setting up ads and posting on sex worker social media, and many hours travelling to and from the bookings themselves, only earns you £449. You don’t divide that figure by the total numbers of hours you’ve worked, because if you added up every minute you spent replying to your work phone and conversing with potential clients and marking your ads as available then you know the pay would work out as less than minimum wage.
All of these calculations are based on real costs that sex workers spend on advertising and hotels. It doesn’t account for the cost of clothes or makeup or condoms or lube or a second phone, based on the idea that you own these things already or are able to obtain them. When it comes to the rates, they will vary massively depending on where you live and whether you’re a member of a minority group that is devalued. Clients are often unwilling to pay sex workers of colour as much money as white sex workers, or to pay as high of a rate to immigrants or men or fat sex workers or various others.
To be able to make this scenario work, you also need to have some level of income to cover the upfront costs which you sell sex to earn back. If you have an unlucky couple of weeks or get sick, you can lose hundreds of pounds spent on advertising. If at any stage you have no money in the bank, you’re forced to make risky choices to earn enough to get back to your usual methods, like meeting a client in their car because you can’t afford travel and hoping they don’t take you to another location or work out where you live if they drop you back close to home.
On top of the costs that cannot be avoided, such as travel and accommodation, it is heinous that escorting websites charge so much money for sex workers to advertise. As the rest of the internet blocks sexually explicit content more and more, outright banning the advertising of any kind of escorting services, sex workers are placed in a situation where we have to pay extortionate prices to advertise ourselves or take on far riskier clients to be able to earn enough to get by.
Charges for changing location, which is something sex workers without a fixed address to work from have to do more often, unfairly penalize poorer workers who are struggling. Increases to the price to display a phone number on our escorting adverts, a necessity for speaking with clients, pushes us to sell galleries of nude photos on those same sites to try and cover some of the cost.
Sex workers deserve better than an online landscape which pushes us off of every site except for those explicitly created for us to advertise on, only to be charged more and more to use the sites that we make profitable.
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