Table of contents
- Before the web: the telephone, the classified ad, the referral
- 1997 to 2010: the directory replaces the small ad
- What the research shows
- Growth, not displacement: “Prostitution 2.0”
- Safety: the Craigslist study
- Britain: “Beyond the Gaze”
- Screening, reviews and reputation: a new kind of trust
- The backlash: Backpage, FOSTA-SESTA and the platform problem
- Germany: the Prostitutes Protection Act and the numbers
- What the internet did not change
- FAQ
If the internet did one thing to the escort industry, it was this: it made the industry measurable. For most of the twentieth century, introductions happened by telephone, through classified advertisements and by word of mouth, and left no trace anyone could count. From the late 1990s onwards they left data — directories, reviews, inquiries and, in Germany since 2017, official statistics. For the first time, economists and criminologists could test claims that had only ever been asserted: whether the market grew, whether it became safer, and who was actually doing the intermediating.
What follows traces that change through verifiable sources — the first online directories, the rise and fall of the big platforms, the research they made possible, and the German regulatory answer. It arrives at a conclusion that sounds contradictory until the evidence is laid out: the internet did not abolish the intermediary. It replaced one kind with another, and then, when the platforms fell, left the question of trust exactly where it had found it.
Before the web: the telephone, the classified ad, the referral
The technology that shaped the industry most before the internet was not the computer but the telephone. It moved the encounter off the street and into flats and hotel rooms, and it produced the figure the language still calls a “call girl” — someone you rang rather than sought out. Intermediation ran through a number at the back of a city paper, through a concierge, through a friend of a friend. The market was local, slow and, for both parties, thick with uncertainty. The client knew little about the lady; the lady knew nothing about the client.
That information gap is the key to everything that came afterwards. The agency of the old school existed to close it: it knew its clientele, it knew its companions, and it vouched for both. The price was dependence. Without the intermediary there was no way into the market at all.
1997 to 2010: the directory replaces the small ad
The United States moved first. According to the economists Scott Cunningham and Todd Kendall, the first researchers to study the online market systematically, the first nationwide online directory for escort advertisements, Eros.com, appeared in August 1997. Review sites followed within a few years — TheEroticReview above all, on which clients recorded their experiences much as travellers rate hotels. In the United Kingdom, the University of Leicester dates the online market as pervasive from around 2000. And in 2002 Craigslist opened an “Erotic Services” section in selected American cities: free, anonymous, used millions of times, and closed in 2010 under pressure from a coalition of state attorneys general.
What shifted across those thirteen years was the barrier to entry. A companion no longer needed an agency to be found; she needed a profile. A client no longer needed an acquaintance; he needed a search engine. Intermediation migrated from the telephone to the database — and the database did not ask who was placing the advertisement.
What the research shows
Three pieces of work have shaped the debate. Each rests on real data drawn from the online market; each was published in a peer-reviewed journal or as a funded university study. One need not accept their conclusions to respect their method.
Growth, not displacement: “Prostitution 2.0”
Writing in the Journal of Urban Economics in 2011, Cunningham and Kendall combined review-site data with their own survey of nearly 700 sex workers who solicited online. Their central finding contradicted the received assumption that the internet had merely moved street work indoors: those advertising online largely represented growth in the overall market rather than a shift from the street, with displacement concentrated among women in their thirties and forties. The survey also suggested that online workers behaved, on average, more cautiously than their street-based counterparts — with the caveat that women moving indoors from the street initially brought riskier habits with them.
Safety: the Craigslist study
The most cited study of all appeared, after a long gestation, in the Journal of Human Resources in 2024. Cunningham, Gregory DeAngelo and John Tripp exploited the fact that Craigslist rolled out “Erotic Services” city by city at different times — a natural experiment. By their estimate, the section’s arrival was associated with a fall in female homicides of between twelve and eighteen per cent in the cities concerned, and in reported rapes of between seven and nine per cent. The authors’ proposed mechanism is that more encounters took place indoors, clients were screened more carefully and matches were made more efficiently. The methodology remains contested; critics argue that inferring reduced violence from online advertising stretches the data. But the paper changed the terms of the argument. Safety became an empirical question rather than a moral one.
Britain: “Beyond the Gaze”
The European view comes from “Beyond the Gaze”, a study by the Universities of Leicester and Strathclyde funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. With 641 sex workers and 1,323 clients surveyed, it was the largest exercise of its kind ever conducted in the UK. Its most durable finding is also its least comfortable: on all available evidence the online sector is the largest part of the British industry, and the part that police forces and support services understand least. Teela Sanders and her colleagues recommended explicitly that health and safety provision be redesigned around online workers, because street outreach simply no longer reaches them.
Screening, reviews and reputation: a new kind of trust
The internet did not solve the old information problem; it opened it in both directions. Clients could suddenly read what others had written about a companion. Companions could ask for references, check names against forums, cross-reference telephone numbers and warn one another, in closed groups, about clients to avoid. Economists call these reputation mechanisms — word of mouth with a memory, operating at the speed of a page refresh.
There was a cost, and the enthusiasm for independence tends to obscure it. Whoever advertises alone must screen alone, decline alone and bear the consequences alone when a profile is faked or a photograph stolen. The work an agency once did in the background did not vanish; it landed on the individual. A problem of intermediation had become a problem of verification — one that could be spread across forums, whitelists and software, but not made to disappear.
The backlash: Backpage, FOSTA-SESTA and the platform problem
Opening was followed by closing. When Craigslist abandoned its section in 2010, the advertisements migrated to Backpage, a classifieds site founded in 2004 by an American newspaper group — and the criticism migrated with them. In 2015, under pressure from an Illinois sheriff, Visa and Mastercard stopped processing payments for the site. In January 2017 Backpage shut its adult section on the eve of a Senate hearing. On 6 April 2018 federal agencies seized the entire platform; five days later the American president signed FOSTA-SESTA, a pair of laws narrowing the immunity that internet services had enjoyed for third-party content relating to commercial sex.
The result was not the end of the online market but its fragmentation. In 2021 the US Government Accountability Office recorded in report GAO-21-385 that federal prosecutors had used the new law precisely once, that advertising had moved to platforms hosted abroad and paid for through complex arrangements, and that investigations had become harder as a consequence. The episode reads as a parable. The platform, not the industry, was the point of failure. Anyone wholly dependent on one portal woke up without a market — a dependence no less complete than the old agency world’s, only without anyone to telephone.
Germany: the Prostitutes Protection Act and the numbers
Germany took a different route from the United States — not platform prohibition but trade regulation. The Prostituiertenschutzgesetz, the Prostitutes Protection Act, has been in force since 1 July 2017. It requires sex workers to register with the authorities and subjects every prostitution business to a licensing requirement; section 2 of the Act expressly includes placement — Prostitutionsvermittlung — among the businesses that need a licence. The internet as a sales channel was not banned but brought under supervision: operators must be licensed, profiles can be tied to a business, and authorities can inspect.
The same year produced the statistics this article promised at the outset. According to the Federal Statistical Office’s press release of 21 August 2026, around 32,500 sex workers held a valid registration at the end of 2025 — up 0.7 per cent on the previous year but well below the 40,400 recorded before the pandemic at the end of 2019. Roughly 2,260 prostitution businesses held a licence. And here sits the figure that does most to correct the popular picture of this industry: 93 per cent of those were premises — brothels and flats. Placement businesses, which is to say licensed escort agencies, accounted for five per cent of licences, a little over a hundred operators nationwide. The statistics count only what is registered; they describe the regulated part of the market, not the whole of it.
What the numbers establish is rarity. Licensed placement in Germany is a small, sharply defined exception, subject to official supervision, with an operator answerable to the licensing authority. Whether that rarity also makes it valuable is not something any statistic can say. It is a matter of interpretation — and the remainder of this piece is an attempt at one.
What the internet did not change
Three things have survived thirty years of technology intact. First, the question of whether the photograph matches the person who walks through the door — a question that retouching, and now image generation, has made more pressing rather than less. Second, the question of who is on the other end of an inquiry; screening is labour, whether one hands it to a forum, a piece of software or a human being. Third, discretion, which cannot be downloaded or rated, and which is inherently less safe in a database than with someone who knows what not to write down.
These three questions can be answered in many ways — through reference systems, review sites, verification services, or an intermediary who knows both parties personally. None of the answers is free. The platform was paid for in dependence, independence in verification work, the agency in a fee. What has changed since 1997 is not that someone pays for trust, but who.
The internet opened this industry up, measured it, and at one point very nearly stripped it of its own infrastructure. What it could not replace was the party that stands surety for both sides. That such a party has become rare is a matter of record. That rarity here means value is my reading of the record — drawn from what, on all the evidence, forums, whitelists and software proved unable to take over.
Editor’s note: Ivana Models was founded in 2017, the year the Prostitutes Protection Act came into force, and has operated as a placement agency within that framework ever since. As a placement agency, Ivana Models works exclusively with independent, self-employed escort models; the photographs of the companions represented by our agency are checked for authenticity, and every inquiry passes through the back-office of our escort service agency, which coordinates the rendezvous. How that works is set out in the inquiry information; we can be reached daily from 09:00 to midnight, also via WhatsApp. Further articles built on verifiable figures are collected under Research & Statistics. A single inquiry is enough.
FAQ
According to the economists Cunningham and Kendall, the first nationwide online directory for escort advertisements, Eros.com, launched in the United States in August 1997. The University of Leicester dates the UK online market as established from around 2000. Craigslist opened its Erotic Services section in 2002 and closed it in 2010.
The research points that way, with caveats. A 2024 study in the Journal of Human Resources estimates that the arrival of Craigslist’s Erotic Services section was associated with a twelve to eighteen per cent fall in female homicides in the US cities concerned, most likely because encounters moved indoors and clients were screened more carefully. The method is disputed, but it remains the most robust evidence available.
Because the internet did not remove the work of verification; it transferred it to the individual. A placement agency meets its models in person, checks that photographs are authentic, screens inquiries in its back-office and only makes an introduction once both parties agree. In Germany, placement is also a licensed activity under official supervision.
Yes. Since 1 July 2017 the Prostitutes Protection Act has regulated the industry: sex workers must register, and prostitution businesses — including placement under section 2 of the Act — require an official licence. As a placement agency, Ivana Models works exclusively with independent, self-employed escort models.
According to the Federal Statistical Office, around 32,500 sex workers held a valid registration at the end of 2025, compared with 40,400 at the end of 2019. Roughly 2,260 prostitution businesses were licensed, of which only five per cent were placement businesses. Unregistered persons are not counted.
Backpage was an American classifieds site founded in 2004 that became the largest marketplace for adult advertising after Craigslist withdrew in 2010. Following years of litigation and a Senate investigation, federal agencies seized the site on 6 April 2018, and FOSTA-SESTA became law days later. In 2021 the US Government Accountability Office found that the market had since shifted to platforms hosted abroad.
A short inquiry by e-mail, telephone, contact form or WhatsApp is enough. The Ivana Models back-office proposes suitable companions, coordinates the appointment and confirms the rendezvous; direct contact follows only afterwards. We can be reached daily from 09:00 to midnight.
