Tryst.link 2021 Wrap Up: The Fight Continues!

Tryst.link 2021 Wrap Up: The Fight Continues!

. 5 min read

Well, that sure was a year wasn’t it? For Sex Workers 2021 has been turbulent to say the least!

Despite everything, 2021 saw some serious strengthening to Sex Worker led movements around the world. Not only have we seen significant movement on the Decriminalisation front, but Sex Workers took hold of their narratives through a number incredible new projects including Petit Mort, TOS Journal, Beyond the Whorizon, Somebody you Love, After Curfew, Sex Work CEO and many more.

We’re also really stoked to have been able to get behind some incredible organisations and events this year, such as The Black Sex Workers Collective conference, SWOP USA, Rails Girls Ghana, Electronic Frontiers Australia , Red Canary, Decolonise SW, Netthing and Scarlet Alliance.

What we got up to

What a year 2021 was for new major features on Tryst! There are just too many to count (you should totally check out our Site Updates section to learn about all the other things we did!) but here are some highlights.

A whole new, super speedy, design

It was nearly a year in the making but in April this year we released the biggest upgrade to Tryst since we started the platform 4 years ago. The new design ensured that Tryst was fast (like, SUPER FAST!), easy to use, and set the ground work for many many new feature plans.

Serious account security improvements

We added Multifactor Authentication to Tryst which makes it significantly harder for an adversary to get hold of your account, even if they learn or guess your password.  Seriously, this is one of the best things you can do to protect your account and our support team will thank you. Haven’t set it up yet? Get on that right away!

We also improved the way Tryst Team messages are displayed so you can clearly tell when a message is from the Tryst team.

Make yourself seen: more profile and visibility features

We added a bunch of new profile sections this year, including deposit and cancellation policies so you can let your potential clients know up front how you work, additional fansite links, and customisable default message templates.

We also added an additional option for trans providers to only show their profile when a client specifically searches for trans providers. We want to specifically thank the trans providers who not only reached out with suggestions, but assisted in the process of designing of this feature set.

Surveys! You can tell us what you think!

We love hearing from you all with your ideas about what we should be prioritizating for Tryst.  We’ve launched a brand new surveys feature so we can turn around feedback faster and ensure we are building the best possible platform.

New in December and January

It may have been the holiday month, but we still got some pretty cool things out the door for you all!

  • You can now select Silver as a hair colour on your profile and as a filter for search queries.
  • This one was a very popular feature request: we will automatically hide your profile if you’ve been inactive on Tryst for more than 3 month. We will, of course, notify you a few weeks prior.
  • No longer want your account? In addition to be able to hide your profile, you can now close your Tryst account from the dashboard without needing to reach out to us.
  • Improvements to the way we show and reveal contact information on your profile.
  • A bunch of little bug fixes, thanks to all of our users who let us know when something isn’t working quite right!

We love to count!

Web traffic and SEO

Every year we share a little about the growth of the site and how our traffic has changed. Every year we shock ourselves with how much growth we’ve seen. In 2021:

  • 126.6 billion requests through our infrastructure (good work, magic sand boxes!).
  • We had 748.6 million page views across 63.4 million unique visits.
  • We showed your thumbnails 4.13 billion times resulting in 274.3 million clicks through to profiles.
  • We served 416.01TB of images across over 8.07 billion total requests. Your photos sure are popular!
  • Tryst was shown on Google search results 150 million times and we saw 22.6 million clicks through to the site.

Site usage

Not only did the site as a whole grow, but we also saw:

  • 89k new client accounts created.
  • 123.9k conversations started on Tryst Messaging and 317k total messages sent.

It’s been a big year for the whole team here, but none more than the support team who have in 2021:

  • Reviewed 245.3k photos uploaded by our wonderful providers. That’s an average of nearly a thousand photos per day!
  • Reviewed 18k profiles of new and returning users to the platform.

Survey Results

We’ve run a series of surveys over the last few months, totally in 2,287 responses across different surveys that we ran in 2021. A huge thank you to everyone who responded, we’re currently processing the submissions over the next few weeks, but we wanted to give you a sneak peak at some of the results;

  • The most popular search filters, after location, are: gender, age, body type, service type, and base rates.
  • More than 70% of surveyed clients say they read or follow your linked social & fansite accounts.
  • Over 60% say they have subscribed to your fan sites after finding them on your Tryst profile.
  • Clients think the photo gallery, availability & rates are the most important sections of a profile.
  • This was followed closely by your bio, attributes and contact information.

Wrapping up

That's the end of our 2021 overview for now, but before we go we wanted to highlight some of our favourite pieces from the past year.

Highlights from the blog

We’ve had some incredible contributions from across the community covering everything from preventing shit stains on the bed to anti sex work feminism. Here are some of our favorites from the past 12 months.

We’d like to say a massive thank you to everyone who contributed to, read and shared the Tryst blog in 2021. With more eyeballs Sex Workers than ever before, we hope to help share more of our stories and industry insights in 2022. Keen to contribute? Head over to our Write for us page.

Signing off

Even though 2021 saw some serious growth for Tryst, and we expect 2022 to be exactly the same. We hope that next years post is another unprecedented year in growth.

Thank you to everyone who called Tryst home in 2021, we wanted to cap this post off with some of the things that made us smile this year;

The platform was created by SWs, and so they’re totally awesome to work with. They also have a 21st century understanding of gender and body diversity. ♥️♥️♥️
"I am so grateful to be addressed with respect and kindness here. I don’t know if you’ve ever had to email with other ad sites, but they’re not even playing the same game Tryst is.”
"Tryst has allowed me to work safer, smarter and more often and I cannot thank you enough for allowing me to be a part of this platform. Truly life changing.”