Playing the Name Game: A review of advertising practices and success of Canadian sex workers

Previous studies that considered factors associated with success in sex work used measures such as hourly rates to identify more successful workers. However, such indicators are only an indirect measure of client interest. This study considers a prominent classified advertising venue in Canada that provided statistics on how often ads were viewed, providing a potentially more direct measure of client preferences. Daily views were calculated for a collection of 62582 classified ads generated by 12477 advertisers between July 9, 2023 and August 9, 2023. Factors associated with daily views and language use in ads were considered. During this period, ads were viewed median 128 times per day per ad (IQR 64-248, mean 195, SD 234). Significant findings were that spending more on advertising was not found to result in more daily views. BIPOC advertisers could be associated with more or fewer views compared with White advertisers, with Asian and Black advertisers having fewer views and Hispanic, Middle Eastern, First Nations, and Indo Canadian having more. Male advertisers received ~50% fewer views. Advertisers with large numbers of daily views were much more likely to restrict clients based on race and age than advertisers with fewer daily views. Further work is needed to understand the relationship between ad views and actual ad response. Some assumptions about sex buyers’ race based preferences were shown to be accurate while others were not, suggesting that these preferences are not adequately accounted for by existing theory. Also highlighted is class separation among sex workers, with increased views being associated with greater ability to set boundaries during client interactions.