Good afternoon kmart shoppers, looks like we’ve make it though another year? Despite the concept of time ceasing to hold any tangible meaning, it continues to churn on and So. Much. Has. Happened. We had the Sex Industry Book Club with Jessie and PJ Sage (fun🥰 ), the continued fight sex worker rights, reproductive justice, and bodily autonomy (so not chill 😩). We were able to donate to and support some rad organisations, and we continued to battle bad online legislation and policy (super unfun 😔). But best of all? We got to match you all donation for donation, supporting mutual aid on a fricking wild level! (maximum excellence, heckin proud my guys 😎)
What we got up to in 2022
We work hard on ensuring that Tryst.link is a great platform and this year was no exception. We thought we’d highlight a couple things the team worked on this year.
Giving you security tools to keep your account in your control
Last year we were the first directory to implement multi-factor authentication, a best practice security tool you can use to ensure only you have access to your account. MFA allows your to add a software or hardware device to your account that authenticates your login, meaning that even if someone else steals or guesses your password, they will still be unable to login without this token.
This year we brought email based MFA to all our users so that even those who don’t have a token based option enabled have some protection. We highly recommend you enable MFA on your account immediately for maximum security.
Loads of interface upgrades
We’re always working on improvements to the Tryst.link UI to ensure it is both easy and enjoyable to use the platform. This year the search interface got a fresh coat of paint and a whole bunch of improvements to how filters are displayed, giving it a nice modern refresh. The new interface is easier to use, much better on mobile, and makes it easier to see what filters you have applied to your current search.
We also gave the navigation a large refresh, ensuring that everywhere you see navigation now uses the same design. No more options moving around or icons changing just because you changed what page you’re looking at!
A more open and accessible platform
On top of those obvious bits of work, we also did a lot of accessibility improvements across the entire platform, ensuring that Tryst.link is available to everyone. This includes things like improved screenreader support, easier to tap or click interface elements, and allowing greater flexibility on how your present yourself and your pronouns.
The Good Client Guide
We worked together with Georgie at The Satisfaction Project this year to build out a collection of resources for clients, culminating in the Good Client Guide. This series of articles and videos helps clients understand how to have more successful interactions with providers, as well as offering advice on important topics like hygiene and consent that may get overlooked.
Clients can access the guide from their dashboard along with articles from the blog, providers can check it out via this sneaky link. We’ve even created a series of shorts we are going to use to promote the guide, like this one below that talks about hygiene!
Web traffic and SEO
As is tradition, we love to share a couple of stats to outline how our traffic has changed each year. Every year we are shocked by these numbers!
- We had 861.6 million page views across 87.41 million unique visits.
- We showed your thumbnails 5.48 billion times resulting in 396.25 million clicks through to profiles which were viewed 489.72 million times.
- We served 489.3TB of images across over 9.8 billion total requests. Your photos sure are popular!
- Tryst was shown in Google search results 329 million times and we saw 37.4 million clicks through to the site.
Y’all sure have been busy on the platform this year as well! Over the last 12 months, we have seen:
- More than 80,000 new client accounts.
- More than 150,000 conversations started with over 350,000 messages exchanged.
- More than 380,000 photos uploaded to profiles, that’s more than a thousand photos every single day!
Our incredible support team has been working hard as well, reviewing over 35,000 profiles this year and answering more emails than we can poke a stick at. We think the team does an incredible job, but rather than waxing lyrical we thought instead we would highlight some comment from the community instead:
“Thank you so much! Your support staff has consistently been helpful and very calming to talk to, which is hugely appreciated for such a sensitive kind of work.”
"Thank you infinitely for helping me I have no words for how thankful I am. Thank you so much for the best support I’ve ever received.”
"Thanks for the timely response and the individual attention necessary to make the call! I wasn’t sweating it. I love the Tryst team."
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
In 2022 was a big year for the Tryst.link blog, with over 458,000 visitors. We posted some stellar pieces opening up dialogues around polefit, bodily autonomy, and censorship. You can find some of our favourites below:
- "Until we are all truly free, certain cultural practices should remain off limits to outsiders" | Polefit and Sex Work - Selena the Stripper
- So You No Longer Own Your Body: A Sex Worker’s Guide to a Life Without Bodily Autonomy - Adrie Rose
- A Tryst with Raleigh escort Xan Tiago
- No Platform but Our Heels: In Conversation with Squiggles and Sluts - Sam Stone
- Whorephobic tech, slut-shaming and the stress of being deplatformed - Vixen Temple
- “Uncloseted, but uncomfortable.” Dealing with sex work and family in the holiday season - Georgie Wolf
- Whore History with Old Pros: Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera - Kaytlin Bailey and Dr. Charlene Fletcher
2022 also saw the launch of Sluts for Security. Our newest contributor, the lovely Ada Hamilton, joined the team to cover everything from MFA to Phishing to help ya’ll keep the scammers at bay and your accounts safe.
Signing off
To sign off, we want to say a massive thank you to everyone who called Tryst home in 2022. We would not be where we are without your support. Here are some of the things that made us smile this year;
"I absolutely LOVE and appreciate all the Tryst Team do for us workers. Tryst is a safe place, that treats us with respect and is for the workers, not against them like other sites. I tell all my clients about Tryst, it’s truly the best. I really hope it becomes the most widely used ad site in the U.S, and hopefully world wide. Tryst customer service is bar none. And the Tryst website is easy to navigate, has so much helpful information like educational blogs, and I love the wide variety of the search engine features."
“Thank you for being so supportive of the sw community ❤️❤️❤️❤️ I really appreciate yall. Sw organizations just do so much for us and I love the sense of community that y'all cultivate. That being said it really feels better giving y'all money then the shady other advertising sites. Thank you!!!”
“I absolutely cannot stress this enough — finding @WeAreTryst has brought me back to prepandemic earning levels & I finally feel like I can breathe again after a year where I was out a lot due to injury. I’m honestly crying comparing my Oct income to any other month since 2020.”
I can't overstate how often in this line of work you're just left hung out to dry as an automated machine response shrugs at a serious and significant destruction of your ability to support yourself, I am so thrilled that Tryst isn't the same.
