2024 is done and dusted, hello 2025! Let's take a stroll down memory lane and reflect on Tryst.link’s last 12 months.
House keeping & maintenance
As Tryst.link has grown over the years, we've prioritised new features, but in 2024 the focus was on maintenance. Lots of little things like making sure all the bits of the website have the same consistent style, creating a proper accounts settings page and reducing any janky bits and bobs across the board. You might not have noticed or even seen all these little updates, but taking the time to do some maintenance and tidy the place up gives us a great foundation to continue building Tryst.link into 2025 and beyond.
Sign language is popular
Adding the ability for providers to share the languages they prefer to communicate in is a new feature we are particularly proud of. We were surprised (and delighted) to discover that sign language is quite popular! American Sign Language is the 8th most popular out of all languages providers communicate in and there's 11 sign languages in total that providers on Tryst.link have placed on their profile page. How cool is that?
Assembly Four attended SXSW Sydney
SXSW (aka South by Southwest, not sexy sex workers, unfortunately) took place in Sydney, Australia, back in October and Assembly Four - the parent company of Tryst.link - was lucky enough to attend and enlighten a bunch of tech and business people about modern day sex work. We handed out copies of a little zine that busts myths, explains language, and dives into the Online Safety Act, age verification on the Internet, and the encryption debate. It's available as a PDF on Assembly Four's website if you'd like to take a look.
Processing times reduced
We know that a headache for providers on Tryst.link has been the time it gets to get verified. It took a lot of effort, we expanded the team, reviewed our workflows and streamlined our processes, but we've managed to improve on the time it takes to get verified. At the start of 2024 it took 2 months on average for a provider to be verified on Tryst.link, but as of early 2025 it’s now only 10 days! During 2025 we hope to keep improving our processing times, especially as Tryst.link grows and more providers join us.
We're on Bluesky now
It’s no secret that Twitter/X turned into an even bigger dumpster fire in 2024 and it’s doubtful the flames will shrink in 2025. Bluesky popped up as an alternative to Twitter/X and Tryst.link has a presence there. We will still hang around on Twitter/X, but if you’d like to get onboard with Bluesky, check out this useful Instagram post the Tryst.link social media team made about migrating from Twitter/X to Bluesky.
Trystmas 2024
We know that work often slows down during the holiday season, so for the last few years we’ve run Trystmas and given out loads of TLC to providers that they can use to offset some of the cost of operating their Tryst.link accounts. Trystmas 2024 was our largest Trystmas ever, with over 800,000 TLC sprinkled across our providers. That’s the equivalent of more than 800,000 euros, $826,000 yankee bucks or $1.3 million Aussie dollarydoos.
Donations & Donation Matching TLC
Community is important to us and one of our missions is to support that community as best as we can, be it through direct financial sponsorship, free consulting, or through our donation matching program. Our top recipients via the donation matching program for 2024 are:
- SWOP USA - $13,000
- PACE Society - $9,600
- Maggie’s Toronto - $9,000
- Stella Montreal - $7,300
All up, over 74 organisations received 1117 donations from 437 users during 2024. Thank you so much for your support and generosity for these great organisations.
Direct donations & sponsorships
Via Assembly Four we are delighted to have donated a total of €101,188.85 (approximately US$105,000) to the following organisations in 2024:
SWOP USA - a national social justice network dedicated to the fundamental human rights of people involved in the sex industry and their communities, focusing on ending violence and stigma through education and advocacy.
Working Girl Press - a book publisher committed to collaborative and collectivist publishing practices that publishes, promotes, and supports the writing and art of sex workers.
Free Speech Coalition - the nonprofit, non-partisan trade association for the adult industry.
Digital Rights Watch Australia - Digital Rights Watch exists to ensure fairness, freedoms and fundamental rights for all people who engage in the digital world.
RubyConf AU - a conference to share knowledge about the Ruby programming language amongst like-minded Rubyists.
Purplecon - from their website: “a sorta sparkle-coded communitycore librarypunk pastelpilled starry-eyed leaf-adjacent functional and real conference”.
ASSfest - a yearly event hosted by the Australian School of Sexuality, a collective of affiliated sexuality educators.
When We’re Not Hustling - a weekly podcast that explores the lives and identities of sex workers outside our personas.
Odyssey Literary Festival - a student-run event full of panels, poetry performances, collaborative artmaking, and in-conversations with established and emerging writers.
Interesting web traffic & Tryst stats
- 1392 million page views - how many times pages the web servers served
- 135 million visits - how many times a person visited our website
- 8.93 billion thumbnail impressions - how many times a thumbnail was shown to someone
- 672.2 million thumbnail clicks - how many times someone clicked a thumbnail to see a larger picture
- 837.74 terabytes of bandwidth to display images - the amount of internet pipe used just to show images
- 417 million impressions in Google search results - how many times a Tryst.link page showed up in Google
- 61.7 million clicks on Google search results - how many times someone visited a Tryst.link page via Google
- 2,260 photos uploaded on Nov 20th - the most in a single day in 2024!
We also noticed a dip in traffic during the Paul Logan vs Mike Tyson fight that was broadcast via Netflix on the 15th of November, and a spike in traffic after the fight, as well as an even bigger dip in traffic over Thanksgiving (28th Nov) in the USA as everyone had other things to do besides visit Tryst.link!
Highlights from the Tryst.link blog
2024 was a huge year for the Tryst.link blog. We published 251 pieces from sex workers. We’re also proud that blog visitors spent an average of 17.5 minutes on the site per visit - it doesn’t sound like much but holding someone’s attention for that long on the internet is really good! Here’s some of the wonderful articles that had readers captivated:
- Bottoms and Tops, We All Hate Cops
- Hoes Odes: An Ode to Amphetamines and Store Bought Dopamine
- Sex Work, Disability, and Access
- No Sugar Without Sugar: Why Sex Work Can't be Divorced from Sex
- Whoreview: Saltburn
- What's Your Real Name?
- Call Your Representative: The Bills Currently Affecting Sex Workers
- Hobby Whores - Plant Identification: Herbalism with Em Rose
- Hoes Odes: Timewaster
- Sluts in Gameland
- Self Publishing for Sex Workers
- How to Support our Trans Sex Working Siblings
- Send Me Your Wives
- Whoreview: The Passion of New Eve by Angela Carter
- Authentic Iterations: The Complexity of Escort Brands
- Covid Harm Minimisation and the Disabled Sex Work Community
- Working While Trans: What it’s Like to Transition at Work
- Hoes Odes: Black Str!pper, White Club
- What Is (and Isn't) FinDom
- Cis For Pay
- Making Porn: Choosing Authenticity Over Marketability
- Let Sex Workers Work
Goodbye 2024, Hello 2025!
Hope you enjoyed this look back on Tryst.link's 2024. In 2025 we aim to make the Tryst.link experience even better, support more sex worker-led causes, continue highlighting your stories and keep on agitating for the rights of sex workers across the world. We know it can be a bit of a slog when we experience stigma, abuse and discrimination for simply doing our jobs. Here's some of the feedback that kept our team going during 2024 when times got tough. From the entire Tryst.link team, we wanted to highlight some of our favourite messages of the last year and take the opportunity to thank you all for your honest feedback, kind words and support for the year of 2024, it means a lot to the entire team.
"I really appreciate how you all on the Tryst Team conduct business. It is by far the most professional, caring, reliable and highly functioning customer support I have ever had the pleasure of working with! Happy Trysting, ✌️☺️"
"I JUST WANTED TO SAY THANK U TO ALL THOSE AT TRYST •~ I APPRECIATE YOU & YOUR PLATFORM"
"I've been a provider and have had a profile here on tryst link for quite a while now, 5+ years, and your support and service has always been phenomenal thank you so much".
"Thank you all so much! I'm very grateful for Tryst being a safe, reputable, verified ho-ho-home for me to be. I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday season and a happy new year!"
"omg thank you sooo much for your very human attentive help. i feel it and it truly means the world!""
"really appreciate all that y'all do for us SW.thanks for helping inform educate the sw and clients and really push some boundaries for so many in "the industry". Y'all are by far where other sites should be aspiring to be like. You've really taken the bar to a whole nother level"
Are you a sex worker with a story, opinion, news, or tips to share? We'd love to hear from you!
We started the tryst.link sex worker blog to help amplify those who aren't handed the mic and bring attention to the issues ya'll care about the most. Got a tale to tell? 👇☂️✨
