I think it is always interesting to read and to contemplate research, but I do wonder if you fully comprehend how much different the “Merb scene” is than the majority of what you studied?
I had a great deal of difficulty keeping the length of the paper down to less than 8000 words so I had to leave out many points that I think should be made. One of these is sex work represents a wide variety of people. All ages, shapes, income levels are represented in one way or another from what I have seen. There are a sizable number of guys offering services to women - do we ever hear about this in the press let alone research in Canada?
The general theme of the paper I think holds true: things are not as they seem. This is a much more pervasive sub culture - including both clients and SPs - than anyone wants to admit. Anyone thinking they are alone just hasn't been around long enough.
I've been involved in one way or another with the review sites since 2005 mainly I've used some of the others. I'm well aware and its abundantly clear there are distinct sub-communities. The
S3 and
S4 Appendices associated with the paper discusses this in more depth.
The more recent ads I've been looking at the median and mean days online are much closer (i.e. the distribution isn't so dominated by very short term advertisers) and I'm seeing that people are likely advertising for 7 months on average. One reason for this change from 2014-2016 may be COVID discouraged many of the opportunistic advertisers. However, I think the platform also makes a difference. Its a huge pain in the ass to advertise on LL for example. It took me two days to get set up. On the review sites the focus is more on developing long term online connections with people I would think. Each platform is going to attract different people. However, it appears that everybody - at least back 5 years ago - eventually wound up advertising on the classified sites at some point or other. It might not have been that consistent but it did happen.
I'm also doing a follow up looking at the a recent sample of the workers who include web addresses in their contact information. I'd say most of the advertisers, when they have their own websites, have been in the business for 3-5 years at least. OF hasn't been in operation long enough but there are people on there apparently from the beginning who also advertised on classified sites (note one option on classifieds after COVID is "Online"). The people using OF tend not to have their own websites. There are people using social media with huge followings. Of the advertisers I sampled many had > 2k followers with a handful having more than 50k followers. However, these long term people may not be the majority.
For the 79 advertisers who represent collectives the range in numbers is 2-82 and in the last month it appears that 13% quit and were replaced. I'm going to try and monitor this over the next 6 months but this is a pretty unequivocal indication that people move around a lot in the business, if not outright retire or take breaks. This pattern isn't surprising, this is one business where the worker has a lot more control than even other gig work situations where usually the workers don't have direct contact with prospective customers before doing business.
