[manquer]

Perhaps the regular price for your friend is high end equivalent of 1200 ?. The author strongly says the population of an area makes a big difference in the rates you can charge.

Also mean income (as measured by her study of other workers) is $100,000 with her average rates of her sample around 500-600.

Effectively

    = F(x)(y)(z)

   X - number of people earning 200x the hourly rate

   Y -  % of that interested in paying for sex[1]

   Z - relative beauty rank among service providers[2] in that area

You cannot control beauty much but you could change for location and optimize for all the factors to get best rate[3]. Or optimize for total money depending on what is preferred.

[1] age is strong factor so demographics is a good proxy metric.

Also perhaps friction with law is proxy for cultural acceptance and can be numerically scaled : fully legal, decriminalized, or criminal with quantum of punishment for scaling. And degree of enforcement measured by number of arrests / convictions etc.

[2] probably being 9 in LA wouldnt be the same as say Wyoming( demand would be lesser as a counter pressure)

[3] touring is a thing perhaps because of this.

[native_samples]

Well they all tour because otherwise they saturate demand after a week or two in a local area. It's not about big disparities in local earning potential. Guys like novelty and even the ones that pick a girl and stick with her can't afford to come all the time.

No, prices are almost standardized, at least in the 'normal' escorting world. I was surprised by this at first. My belief had always been that it'd be super competitive and the hottest girls would charge the highest prices, but it's not like that. Turns out guys don't really care that much about what a girl looks like beyond a baseline level of beauty, which is why so many can get away with hiding their face.

What does matter a lot is what special services are offered (e.g. dominatrix stuff has a different price), and customer retention, which is 100% about whether you're nice and make the guys feel happy. The most successful girls are the ones that develop a loyal customer base. A few men even follow the girls around as they tour, but that's rare. Girls who are cold, uninterested etc don't get repeat custom and exhaust the area quite quickly.

Whether to go high end or not probably depends a lot on how much else you have going on in life. Aella presumably has lots of other projects like OnlyFans, social media etc. This girl was a full timer. It was her job, and she worked pretty long hours (not anymore). She didn't use social media or create websites or whatever. That's normal. Most escorts use ad sites but they aren't creating dedicated websites for themselves. This girl doesn't even use social media at all, not even in her personal life (and never did, and she's not old).

I did ask her once about the high end work but she indicated that at these sorts of prices you could get maybe one client a month, which just wasn't enough to be interesting given she could be making thousands per day reliably by charging a more normal price (a few hundred an hour). And of course with fewer customers you're a lot more exposed to one of them not coming anymore. The people saying "wow $1200/hr is a lot" are right, I suspect only in Silicon Valley are there a large enough percentage of über-rich but unlucky-with-women people to pay those sorts of rates. Most guys visited her around payday, it was a very cyclical business.

If you do ever get to know an escort on a personal level, or especially more than one, be aware that this is a world that will seem - to the average office worker at least - astoundingly racist. It's touched on in the article but is something else that surprised me a lot. All the girls have strong opinions about different races and a large number demand to know a client's race before they turn up and will simply refuse clients of particular races. There is no stigma or shame associated with such discussions or policies. In escorting there are no HR departments to tell people what to think, 'diversity' isn't a thing, they're all independent or at most work with one or two other girls who are just like them. Learning about this made me reflect a lot on to what extent the middle class office/tech world obsession with anti-racism is a function of the heavy level of filtering that goes on at the front door as part of selecting for skills, university, background etc. The belief that everyone is culturally homogenous and race is just a pigment, just doesn't fly amongst escorts. They learn to generalize about their client base very quickly. To them the link between race and culture is both real and of critical importance.

[manquer]

Interesting and insightful information. I wouldn't think $1000/ hour as lot from consultant PoV. The billable hours are only small part of the hours compared to time put in other related work, in this case activities like screening, adverts, keeping fit, healthcare, accessories, photo-shoots adverts etc. At the same time the sense I get from your post is few hundred/hour as mid range and not high end, maybe it is my lack of knowledge of how this works, but to me it feels like even that is expensive/high-end for most people out there.

I am surprised that saturation can happen in 2 weeks. Unless I am completely clueless about this, that is probably maybe 20-25 appointments (having more than sex 3-4 times a day especially professionally(she seemed to do most of the work) must be incredibility exhausting ). Even if more was possible I can't manage to schedule more than 3 external work meetings a day that is not video conference, scheduling definitely must be more challenging than that here.

It seems pretty small pool if saturated after only 20-25? Perhaps the screening process or narrow advertising ability ( only few platforms allow/ expensive) limiting the reach or competition is pretty heavy at this price point perhaps.

What you are describing regarding race is they find putting race a filtering criteria helps keep screening easier (Somewhat analogous to companies only hiring from tier-1 universities etc ). Better screening leads to better results in hiring rather than arbitrary criteria, I can attest to this in hiring, perhaps it applies here as well but it usually cheaper /easier to implement criteria than screen candidates better for companies. If institutional resources don't do it well, independent workers can hardly be expected to do better. I don't think anything is wrong in sex workers applying race or any type of criteria, it is risky and vulnerable business without any legal or social support, they have to err on the side of caution if they can.

I am not sure there has been exploration of the emotional stress and challenges for the client too. Imagine being rejected often(race or not) even when you are ready to pay for sex on top being unable to attract partners normally that would be quite hard to accept for anyone.

Also the amount of personal information clients are expected to share and references they need to have (while I understand why it is being asked) is pretty steep. There are so many vectors this information may leak from and could damage your life/marriage, lead to arrests etc. That has got to be stressful too.. I would be totally paranoid towards sharing any PII, I guess a good chunk of rich men in the valley would also hesitate on that.

[native_samples]

Only 3-4 appointments would have been considered a bad day, by this woman. You'd think it'd be exhausting but they are usually young and have a lot of energy, and 3-4 hours work is a lot less than most people do per day. The men come to them usually. For the high throughput cases they team up with another girl who pretends to be them on the phone and handles the scheduling and screening because that's also a full time job.

So within two weeks (working 6-7 days per week) it's easy to pack in like 80 different punters and there's a limited supply in most towns. Most men aren't visiting, and there are plenty of other girls competing for the business. In a big city sure you can't saturate it but there's also correspondingly much more competition and the police are more active, so some of them prefer to avoid the cities and stick to the smaller conurbations.

Most men don't share any PII. They pay in cash and may or may not use their real names. If they get "banned" it's the phone number that gets banned.

[manquer]

In the blog post she talks about ID cards linkedin profiles, paystubs, blacklists ,refs from other escorts thats a ton of PII!.

My understanding was cash is more because tax or no service from formal banking, not directly to hide identity

[native_samples]

I guess that's another aspect that differs from what I heard, then. I don't think it's normal for customers to share their real identity or be required to do so.