How common is “survival mode”?

I certainly recognize that not all escorts are living the high life, and the typical “economic analysis” sometimes posted by clients — “X visits per day x $Y x 20 day/month x =” — are understandably offensive.  P4P is not like a normal 9 – 5 job where you can count on a reliable stream of work.  There’s a lot of time taken up in marketing, screening, making arrangements, etc.  And a lady can’t count on X number of visits per week anyway.  Clients may come and go; a lot of them only see a lady once or twice before moving on, or concentrate on the “flavor of the month”; reliable regulars may be relatively few.  In today’s economic climate, some clients have less disposable income to spend on P4P; they may be playing less frequently or “bargain hunting.”  It’s a tough world.  Some ladies may get very few calls a week/month.

I’ve known some ladies who, in good times, were able to gross $150,000 per year.  They were probably a pretty small proportion of the escort population.  Others are at the other end of the spectrum, just barely getting by.  I remember several years ago Lady X posting on ASPD that she was only grossing maybe $1,400 a month.  It shocked me; not necessarily that Lady X, specifically, wasn’t getting much business, because I didn’t know her well, but that she stayed in the business despite that minimal income.  Maybe I’m spoiled, because I’ve never had to survive on that level of income (although some of my relatives have). 

In any event, I never gave it a lot of thought.  But I guess I assumed that there were only a few ladies at the high end of the range or at the low end of the range, and that most of the ladies were somewhere in the middle; maybe grossing $40,000 – $60,000 a year, or possibly a bit higher.  I’m not sure why I thought that.  In retrospect, a lady grossing $25,000 or $30,000 wouldn’t necessarily have better options — some would, but others wouldn’t, particularly if they lacked education or experience — so it’s not as though they could easily change jobs for something better.

In any event, yesterday I ran across a post over on Antonella’s blog.  She, too, is in “survival mode” (around 7 to 8 sessions a month) and suspects it is much more common than most clients realize.  (She links to a blog by another lady who similarly is just getting by.)

It’s not talked about a lot.  Of course, announcing to the world that your business is not doing well probably won’t attract a lot of clients (at least, the ones who aren’t attracted by the prospect of using your desperation to haggle for lower rates); an appearance of success breeds success.  So the ladies don’t have a strong incentive to be candid about it.  On P4P boards or blogs, probably as many ladies report that they’re doing well despite the economy as say their business is down significantly, and some of the former may just be pretending.  Even the latter often don’t clarify exactly how bad they’re doing.  So maybe there are a lot more ladies in survival mode — say, less than $20,000 gross annually — than we realize.

Obviously, candid discussions between businesses and customers about how well the business is doing are not always easy.  It’s probably even harder in P4P to have discussions like that.  So it’s unlikely we’ll ever get more than a few anecdotes; certainly not a broad, representative view that would quantify how well the ladies are doing.  And I certainly don’t have the answer of how to increase their revenue stream, whether in general or for a specific lady.

But it has me wondering.