Companions Guide is a provider-run escort directory and adult community where you can search for professional female companions in the USA and Canada. We are very particular about who we allow on our directory and only list companions who have an established and professional web presence and can be verified as being independent, over the age of 21, and not trafficked or coerced in any way.
We do NOT charge any fees for companions to be listed on our website. We will NEVER charge any fees or ask for any kind of payment to have your listing included on our directory or to use our website. This is provided as a free service to give you an alternative to all the directories that have popped up looking to profit off your information and your vulnerability and lack of choices. This vulnerability and the general lack of viable marketing choices is exclusive to the escort world. We aim to help offset that vulnerability to at least some small degree.
Who We Are
Companions Guide is run by a two-person team utilizing a lot of open-source software to give you a no-cost advertising platform. Our team consists of a provider with two decades of experience in the escort and adult entertainment world and a site administrator with over 15 years of experience in web design, UX and UI design, and marketing.
How Other Websites Operate
Almost all directories geared toward adult companions and entertainers operate the same way. They usually start out as free services or "scraper" sites that use your information to help drive traffic to their website and build up their rankings in the search engines. They'll encourage you to promote them in order to provide a sort of symbiotic relationship where you work, both directly and indirectly, to build up traffic to their website. In return, they give you an advertising spot on the website. But there's a catch—there's always a catch.
Once they believe they've established enough ranking and traffic to justify an advertising fee, they either start charging you for your once free listing or they implement a tiered advertising system, placing your "free" listing at the bottom of that tier. At some point down the road those free listings disappear as well and you are then expected to pay a fee for advertising on their site. Even though it was your(a culmination of many different companions) information and promotion that was the impetus for their increase in traffic and rankings, you are now indebted to them and must pay them to use their service.
To add insult to injury, you have to pay them regardless of how well their site is producing for you. Your return on investment(ROI) might be good or decent, or it might be a big fat nothing. Doesn't matter, because you pay for their perceived success as a revenue generator for you, not the actual value they return to you. Your ads/information and your promotion were the primary reasons they were able to grow their traffic and establish a foothold within the search engines, and now you are expected to be the revenue source for that success. You'll also notice that, as time goes on and the advertising site owners become more comfortable with their position in the market, they become less receptive and start focusing on ways to generate new traffic and income streams.
In short, you as a collective of companions put in the work and helped them achieve clout, now you are the ones to pay for that clout.
Why Does This Matter?
Sure, in a free market you have the option of just not advertising with them and finding something else. But the sad reality is that alternatives that have good traffic, that aren't run by people looking to manipulate and prey on vulnerable ladies, and aren't operating with the same kind of diminishing returns are almost non-existent. Most of these site operators are primarily focused on making a profit off your information. Once they believe their value to you is X amount, they don't want to settle for anything less than X amount. And that X amount will inevitably grow regardless of what kind of value you are getting in return. Your safety and the actual ROI they provide to you is of little concern to them as long as someone else comes along and is willing to play the ROI gamble.
And I assure you, when you're dealing with people who are stigmatized by most of society and are often in a state of desperation because of a lack of alternatives, or maybe they're just naive about the predatory nature of people looking to profit off the vulnerability of those in this industry, there will be plenty who feel they have no other choice than to take the gamble.
Of course making a profit is vital to keeping a larger, busy website online, and it's how websites/businesses operate. But this isn't just any industry. This is a highly stigmatized industry where companions are preyed on and taken advantage of Left and Right, usually have limited family and support networks in place, kicked off and censored on social media, and banned from most other regular advertising platforms that could generate traffic/profit for them. Most of these escort directory owners know this and take full advantage of it.
How Is Companions Guide Different?
Companions Guide provides a free advertising platform for independent companions and we don't charge any fees for listings or membership; and we will never implement any kind of payment system to use or view any section of this website. We're not really too concerned with profit. With other sites in the past we've generated money for operating costs by using affiliate links. This was usually more than enough to offset the minimal hosting costs it takes to operate a website. We feel that if we can make enough to keep the site online, then that's good enough to keep doing what we're doing.
Most "escort directories" don't take nearly as much money to keep them up and running as you might be lead to believe. Hosting is not that expensive for the vast majority of websites out there, and since the advent of the modern CMS, most administrative duties on even a large site can be handled by one person or just a few people. They charge you exorbitant fees because they feel they can get away with it, not necessarily because they need it to keep the site updated and running smoothly. Eventually, your value to their site is based on how much you're willing to spend on ads. Stop paying for those ads, they no longer need or want you on their site.
Companions Guide eliminates this mentality altogether with an insistence that you are of value based solely on your character and professionalism, not based on how much you're willing to pay or able to pay. Since no companion can gain an advantage over others by paying more to get extra exposure, this gives them more of an incentive to focus on being as "professional" as possible and staying within our listing guidelines. Not to mention there never comes a time when a companion has to decide between paying for ads or paying her rent or putting food on the table. In an industry full of uncertainty and constant harassment, we choose to not add to their burden in any way, shape, or form.
Why Does Companions Guide Do This For Free?
Why not do it for free? We have a lot of experience in website design, marketing, and advertising in the adult industry. This experience makes it much easier for us to provide a usable platform with the lowest possible operating costs. In normal circumstances and in a "normal" industry this wouldn't be something that needed to be thought about too much. You make an active and viable community or business where people pay for a service you provide. As you grow that business/community, you grow your profits by increasing the costs for others to use your service.
But as stated before, this isn't just any industry. We know that there are many factors that prevent companions from having viable advertising alternatives or even the ability to pay for advertising when they do find a good advertising platform. We want to help alleviate that problem.
The simplest answer to why we do this for free is because we can do it for free.