

Los Angeles - Home of the cheap 11AM quickie  - ericsessions
http://webchicanery.com/2009/02/11/Prostitution-by-city.html

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uuilly
He thinks that LA differs from Boston b/c of enforcement??? Has he ever been
to either city? Boston is overflowing w/ Irish Catholics and LA is overflowing
w/ scantily clad starlets.

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tdavis
Boston is the land of puritans. I can barely get a beer after midnight, never
mind buy one at a gas station. I'm surprised we even have a bar on that graph.

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numair
This analysis fails to take into account the amount of fake/scam/robo entries
posted on Craigslist (their biggest problem today).

Several of my friends and I have been studying this in detail for a number of
years now... We still haven't figured out why people post fake posts on
Craigslist (especially in the personals section), however it is clear that
there must be some incentive, as these spammers(?) have become increasingly
elaborate. Many of them are ads, of course, however the amount of information
that is exchanged before you learn this suggests that there is some sort of
viral spam content harvesting occurring.

The author of this piece might find that to be an interesting follow-on
study...

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Iconoclast
The spam gets verified addresses, and ones of a specific demographic.

The fake postings generally aren't listed as paid services--that is a much
smaller pool of potential responders--but instead casual, no strings attached
encounters.

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aneesh
Another factor to consider: Boston has a high population of college students
(ie, seasonal residents), making the housing market very active.

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pgebhard
Extending your thought...wouldn't the market then only be that active at those
very narrow seasons?

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akd
This analysis has two major problems. The first is that housing ads are not a
good proxy for total population using Craigslist; different cities tend to
have different "velocities of housing" (how many times people move per year).
He should have divided housing ads by some other housing supply metric and
multiplied by population.

The second is that Craigslist is not the only channel for prostitution. There
are high-end channels such as those used by Eliot Spitzer which may be more
common in affluent cities, any "brothel"-type establishments that exist, and
of course women on the street hollering at cars (the ability to do this may be
severely hampered in colder climates).

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natrius
Also, it assumes that usage of each category on craigslist increases at the
same rate. Since housing and erotic services have strict separations between
them on the site, it seems as if the network effects would be relatively (but
definitely not completely) isolated to individual categories. Secondly,
network effects increase the utility of the site logistically, so the ratios
between different categories at a given point in time aren't meaningfully
comparable.

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markpercival
This is absolutely true, however I did preface it with "The best I could come
up with was the Housing category"

I'm completely open to a better metric. But as I said in the reply above, it's
not easy to determine just how many people in an area use craigslist.

That being said, I'm not sure the two categories have such a hard seperation
between the users. People on craigslist who use it for finding prostitutes
probably also use it to find housing and vice versa.

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jacquesm
Somehow I'm really happy that my ex hometown (Amsterdam) is not on that list
because I have a dark brown feeeling it would not come out too well.

The fact that the author puts the differences between the various cities down
to law enforcement suggests another take on the matter, a new baseline is
needed from places where prostitution is legal.

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anthony_barker
It would be interesting if they covered international cities - Bangkok,
Amsterdam, Berlin come to mind.

