Shell Game

Recently, I’ve received a number of requests for recommendations on advertising sites, both from sex workers and from clients.  For the time being, I only feel safe recommending Slixa, Tryst and Have We Met? because they are the only ones that I know are owned and run by sex workers.  But there are several I’m specifically recommending against, and here’s why.

Eros has long been the industry leader, but after it was sold to Swiss financier David Azzato in or around 2015, customer service (which was never great) got really bad; after the November 2017 raid on its US call center the company pulled all offices out of the US, and customer service essentially vanished.  The following spring (just after the passage of FOSTA) it was sold to the Cyprus-based Kuil Limited, which was founded by Azzato (among others) and is currently owned by the former director of Azzato’s marketing agency.  It was at this time that Eros began inflicting absurd, arbitrary and inconsistent new rules on its advertisers, all aiming toward the very clear goal of having a wealth of identifying data on every last advertiser (to cover their arses if they should be accused of allowing underage advertisers, and possibly to barter with when the Gestapo comes knocking as it has already stated it intends to).  It seems likely that Azzato is playing some kind of shell game and still owns a considerable share of the company indirectly; its current business model appears to be designed around making as much money as possible as quickly as possible prior to burning it down before the US government can.  If that’s the case one would expect Eros, which dramatically increased in size after the carnage of spring 2018, to dramatically raise its rates (as I am told Cityvibe did just weeks before its demise) in order to maximize profits before the planned shutdown.  Well, last week I heard that Eros has done just that; since I stopped advertising there last summer I checked to see how much it would cost me to simply repost my old ad, and found it had increased by 70%.  If you advertise on Eros, I would be looking at moving soon if I were you.

Azzato also owned (owns?) Erotic Monkey, which started out as a scraper site; though some girls are now apparently buying ads on it, most of the ad profiles are stolen and the reviews fake, and information may be either outdated or completely false (not to mention it being pretty sleazy to steal sex workers’ content, including mine, in order to drive traffic to your shitty fake ad site).  As if that weren’t bad enough, Erotic Monkey (who the fuck thought up that stupid name?) was also specifically named in a press release along with Eros (and massage parlor review site Rubmaps, also owned by Azzato) as one the US government intends to loot and destroy in furtherance of its quixotic crusade against “sex trafficking”.  Everything I said about deserting Eros is even more true for Erotic Monkey, which lacks Eros’ name recognition or history as a quality site.

Finally, I want to mention one non-Azzato site:  Skip the Games.  I have never heard one single good thing about this site, and I would advise everyone to stay far away from it.  Skip the Games is dangerous from both ends; it is crawling with cops and other scammers hunting both sex workers and clients.  I’ve seen it listed in cop press releases as a place they put up fake ads (go ahead and Google “Skip the Games” and see for yourself), and most of the non-cop ads are still either scams or sketchy as hell; the ladies who have told me they’ve tried the site said that most of the guys who have contacted them through it are either cheapskates or cops.  From what I can see it’s a site created by scum to welcome others like them, and is succeeding in that respect.