Like many other social phenomena, prostitution is increasingly coordinatedover the Internet. The online behavior affects the offline activity; thereverse is also true. We investigated the reported sexual contacts between6,624 anonymous escorts and 10,106 sex-buyers extracted from an onlinecommunity from its beginning and six years on. These sexual encounters werealso graded and categorized (in terms of the type of sexual activitiesperformed) by the buyers. From the temporal, bipartite network of posts, wefound a full feedback loop in which high grades on previous posts affect thefuture commercial success of the sex-worker, and vice versa. We also found apeculiar growth pattern in which the turnover of community members and sexworkers causes a sublinear preferential attachment. There is, moreover, astrong geographic influence on network structure-the network is geographicallyclustered but still close to connected, the contacts consistent with theinverse-square law observed in trading patterns. We also found that the numberof sellers scales sublinearly with city size, so this type of prostitution doesnot, comparatively speaking, benefit much from an increasing concentration ofpeople.
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