SL escorts next on the Second Life endangered species list?

The casino across the street from our VTOR virtual office in Monti has finally vanished. In its place? A helicopter pad complete with helicopters that look fun to take for a ride but are locked down against letting non-owners fly. With Caliandris posting about age verification now in play, I’m curious how or if this will impact the escort locations? I stopped by one location and snapped the picture below.

I noticed most of the listings were ads looking for escorts, not escorts looking for customers. I tried keeping the screenshot above worksafe, BTW. For my research for this post, I decided to use the WayBack Machine and compare the number of SL escorts in April to today. There were 66 female escorts listed at the end of April 2006 and 6 male escorts for a total of 72. Today, the sl-escort site breaks out by different categories: cyber/roleplay, voice escorts, webcam escorts, submissive, dominant and males . The cyber/roleplay category lists 113 total sl escorts. Not a significant gain, nor a loss, so maybe there will be no impact. I wanted to compile these numbers so there is some meaningful benchmark to check back in the future.

Will Linden Lab target sex in SL next?
Are they already doing it by having an age verification and voice in world? I don’t think non-adults have any business in the adult areas of Second Life and am generally in favor of efforts to keep areas age appropriate. Certainly in the case of escorts, some sort of checking is prudent and responsible.