Advertising Decision Time: Was I Wrong?

Last week, a client told me that a site where I had a free ad on was quite racy. I update my posting there every few months so that those searching for a massage there know that I’m still active, so this was news to me. Lo and behold, I found that the default search results are “pictures only” – um, since when did that become the #1 criteria for a massage therapist? And the majority of the photos were women with at worst a bikini on and at best a good cleavage shot. Honestly, stiletto knee-high boots and fishnets?? Oh, this did not bode well for the likes of me. So I searched for my ad by plugging in my zip code, and I didn’t even show up.

So I found out that MassageAnywhere had become a subscription site, but us unpaid “promotional members” grandfathered in from their free days will randomly show up in results. I thought about it … their annual subscription rate was fair, but then I thought about how little business I’d actually gotten from my ad there over the past 5 years v. how many obnoxious calls. I would often get a spurt of inappropriate inquiries that made me wonder where the site was advertising itself. I mean, when you get 2-3 calls a month on average from a particular advertising venue and suddenly you get 5 calls in a week for “pr0state massage”, you know it has something to do with the site’s advertising, not yours.

Now here’s the scariest new addition to the site: As a user from the client side, you can pay to become a “Friend” and maybe (but not guaranteed) get a Token for your donation that gives you “Unfettered Access” to provider profiles. I can’t begin to describe how shady and provocative that sounds.

So I wrote a pissy email to the folks at MassageAnywhere, explaining why I wouldn’t be upgrading to a paid membership and wasn’t sure I even wanted a free ad on their site. Their reply boiled down to “whatever” because obviously it was more lucrative to have lax rules. And then yesterday, I had two appointments with people who found me through that site and made a BIG chunk of change. Yes, despite preliminary conversations that started with me confirming that they’d read my rules, they both had an interest in “more than a massage”. One wasn’t at all pushy, though he texted me later to say he wished he’d tried, and the other claimed an enormous attraction to my personality as his reason for getting a bit het up (but in no way threatening). I am highly adept at sticking to my code of ethics without getting confrontational when someone attempts to push the envelope – I just give my wiseass side free rein, because it’s somehow face-saving for them while getting my point across exceptionally well.

So now I’m thinking that, if I got 2 appointments in one day from a posting that shows up at random rather than every time NYC is searched, I should reconsider my feelings about paying to advertise on this particular site. I mean, just yesterday I made enough to cover the subscription for 5 years. I’m now wondering if, despite its many drawbacks, MassageAnywhere now has a significant-enough presence on the web to take a chance. Or I could just stick with the freebie.