BP Disappearances & Spiders & Robots
[QUOTE=Thenocturnal;3192124]I've been blaming "sampling error" but it seems to me a _lot_ of the ladies who previously advertised regularly have disappeared from Backpage.
Have they moved to a new advertising site ...[/QUOTE]I know of a couple who may have exited the business. But there are a great many more who have either moved location, or gone on mandatory vacation. And probably more girls (or whoever else manages their ad business) than that who flake out on doing the routine upkeep of renewing ads or keeping working phones, etc. I know some who are just too involved in their daily habit to handle much else.
I also notice that MOST of the other "advertising sites" aren't actual ad sites, meaning there's nowhere for you to click to pay / generate your own ad. The sites I'm talking about often organize the girls' ads by telephone number. They're probably generated by a webcrawler that scans / copies BP ad text and photos to their own site, then try to get you to sign up to comment / review the girls (since they're not getting revenue from the girls' ads). One of these sites even uses a spider (a computer reference to a "webcrawler") as a logo in places.
I think this is also why you'll see a video in some girls' BP ads, but you'll see only ad text / pics in their "ads" on other sites.
The above helps explain why you notice on those other "ad sites" that a single phone number circulates among a few girls. You're either seeing the girls having a common "manager", a crew of girls who wind up swapping phones for convenience, or girls not keeping up with their minutes on one number and shifting to new pre-paid numbers a lot. The sites using a webcrawler to generate ad material will sort ads by phone number because that's the easiest way for the computer to do it with little human interaction.
Last, that webcrawler, number-sorted type site is also how you get those bogus "sting pages" which are really just trying to funnel you away from a free-to-use site lick BP over to a paid-sign-up site. And those places are garbage. I tried AFF once a few years ago (free account, not paid) and out of hundreds of "girl profiles" there were probably less than a dozen actual women on the site. A couple of pros had profiles, a couple of UTR's had profiles, but an overwhelming majority were robot ads managed by the site to establish contact and then try to lure you to a paid account so you could "contact" the (robot) girl and talk more to get her number.