'It's a lot quieter in the club'

Business Insider

28-05-2025

When Hannah graduated from King's College London in 2019 with a degree in business management, she hoped to build a career in marketing. But after struggling to land work in her field, she took a job at a makeup counter — a position that barely covered the cost of her apartment in central London. After a friend introduced her to stripping, she began working occasional shifts to help make ends meet. Hannah quickly realized she could make far more money at the club, so she ditched her retail job to work independently as a stripper.
When the pandemic hit and strip clubs closed, she began dancing at private parties a couple times a month, earning between $2,640 and $4,000 an event, to make rent. After lockdowns lifted, she returned to stripping full time, where she's remained ever since. "You'd think that after studying for three or four years, you could go into a job with better prospects," she says. Though she's applied for the occasional job, she says, "nowadays, it just seems like sex work is the only thing you can go into and actually make decent money."
​​It seems plenty of others are in the same boat. OnlyFans creator accounts surged from around 350,000 in 2019 to 4.1 million in 2023, according to its parent company's latest report. Meanwhile, three times as many provider accounts were created on the escort platform Adult Work in 2022 as in 2019, a Financial Times analysis found. Profiles of women like Bella Thorne — who reportedly made $1 million in 24 hours — made OnlyFans seem like a fast and easy path to wealth. In the face of job rejection emails and seemingly unhelpful university degrees, sex work of all types started to look more like a viable career path for some. While the industry has always skewed young, Gen Z is coming of age amid an internet-driven boom that's luring more and more into the field in pursuit of extra cash and flexible hours. A 2021 study found that the average age of entry to escorting was 22, and a 2024 survey of sex workers in the US found that about 73% of respondents were between 18 and 35, the majority of them women.
The deluge quickly created an oversupply of sex workers. Combined with tightening client budgets, rates began to drop. I spoke with several sex workers, whose names have been changed in order to protect their identities, who turned to sex work to weather a tough job market, only to find that an overcrowded market is making the field far less lucrative for some. On Reddit, sex workers have started discussing lowering their rates to attract more clients. One sex worker I spoke with reported a 30% drop in earnings since 2019. And now, as the economy lurches further into chaos, those who saw sex work as a possible backup plan are facing a tough reality.
"In the past four months this year, something has happened. People are way stingier than they were," Hannah says. "It's a lot quieter in the club this year."
For some graduates in the wake of 2020, sex work offered a rare form of economic opportunity during a time of historic job loss, stagnant wages, and a collapsing job market. "Selling sex has always been the quickest and most direct way to earn money in times of need," says Laura María Agustín, an anthropologist who studies informal labor markets and sex work. That was especially true during the pandemic, which made sex work more visible — and arguably more mainstream — than ever before.
After watching the BBC documentary "Strippers" and seeing how much its subjects earned, Alex began stripping to support herself while in school. Having grown up partly in the foster care system, the 28-year-old learned to be independent early on. "I'm quite entrepreneurial and come from a background where I didn't have money, so I was chasing after it," she says. After graduating from the University of Edinburgh in 2019, she continued stripping until landing a job as an executive recruiter in August 2020. Her starting salary for the office job was £20,000, about $27,000, which dropped to £18,000 after three months, with commission expected to make up the difference. Over half of her take-home pay went toward rent.
During the pandemic, she experimented with camming— live-streaming adult content for paying viewers — for extra cash. She also tried OnlyFans, which she quickly realized required relentless promotion. "You do not know the slog," she laughs. "Not a dollar was made."
After a friend from the strip club started escorting, Alex became curious about the lifestyle and the money she could make. A few months into her job as a recruiter, she began escorting on the side. Soon she was making £6,000 a month. Within two years, she left her day job. "My managers weren't respecting me," she says. "There's this idea that as a junior you're supposed to get your head down and slog, and they don't encourage independent, critical thinking."
Maria, 28, also turned to sex work after growing disillusioned with traditional employment. She'd worked as a paralegal in Australia before moving to London, where she took a job as a receptionist at a law firm. The longer hours, lower pay, and lack of flexibility quickly wore her down. It wasn't until she met a colleague — a fellow receptionist who supplemented her income by dancing in strip clubs — that she began to consider a different path. Soon, she traded the legal office for strip clubs across London and the US.
Lately, though, the work hasn't been as lucrative. Maria says that despite six years of experience, she's making about the same as she did in 2019 when she was a "baby stripper and didn't know anything." Back then, she says, "there was way more foot traffic in the clubs." Now, she says, "customers are definitely stingier." She earns around £5,200 a month for three to four nights of work a week. "I've got so much more knowledge and experience — I should be making more," she says.
Maria attributes that to the economic downturn of the past few years. "People are cheaper and don't want to spend as much. A lot of guys are still saying, 'It's the cost-of-living crisis, I can't afford that,'" she says.
Several US posters in the r/sexworkers Reddit thread said they began noticing a decline in earnings just as economists started talking about a recession after President Donald Trump announced tariffs. Recently, more posters have said business is unusually slow and clients are more demanding. Andrew Lokenauth, a data analyst and founder of TheFinanceNewsletter, who has tracked the sex work industry for 15 years, says revenue at clubs dropped by 35% to 40% from 2022 to 2024 across major US cities. In his work as a financial advisor for strip clubs, he has seen clubs shut down, reduce staff, and cut back their hours as a result of the downturn, and predicts more will close.
"Strip clubs are a winter sport. You're supposed to make the most money in winter," Hannah says. This year, "the earnings weren't as good as we thought they would have been."
Before the pandemic, she says, she was averaging between £5,000 and £7,000 a month for four nights of work a week. Now, she averages between £4,000 and £5,000 for the same amount of work. "Older girls say they easily made £1,000 a night before 2008, but now that's pretty rare in London," Hannah says.
She adds that she's lucky because she has a couple of regulars who come consistently; she's noticed a lot of girls end up sitting around at the club because there aren't enough customers. "You can still make good money, but you just have to work really hard," she says.
There is no middle class in sex work anymore.
The recent belt-tightening comes on the heels of years of upheaval in the industry after the accessibility of sex work platforms like OnlyFans and AdultWork flooded the market with sex workers. Camille Sojit Pejcha, a journalist and the author of the sex and culture newsletter Pleasure-Seeking, says this "created a new hierarchy that rewards celebrities and influencers while pushing everyday sex workers to the margins."
While there are still OnlyFans creators pulling in over $100,000 a month, Lokenauth says average monthly earnings on the platform dropped from about $600 to under $200 in two years. "I've interviewed sex workers and ghostwriters at major agencies, and they all say the same thing: 'There is no middle class in sex work anymore,'" Pejcha says. (Many top creators on OnlyFans now hire ghostwriters to write posts and reply to messages.)
Charlotte saw this firsthand. She began stripping at 19 while in college, just before the 2008 recession slashed corporate entertainment budgets and sent club earnings into decline. She left the industry in her early 20s and moved into conventional work. Now in her mid-30s and paying off a mortgage after buying a flat in London, she returned to sex work last year — this time as an escort. After a decade away, she found herself in a very different landscape — one where oversaturation, falling rates, and burnout have become the norm.
Before the 2008 financial crash, she said, she was making up to £2,000 a night dancing in a strip club. She expected escorting to yield even more, given the greater level of intimacy involved. But her rates have capped out at £300 to £400 an hour, and she averages £1,000 to £3,000 a week — often less than what she once earned in a single night during the strip-club boom years.
"I'm finding it hard," she says. "This just doesn't feel normal — am I the only one struggling?"
Charlotte attributes the shift to the glutted market. "It ruined everything," she says. "Men could buy sex as cheaply as ordering Uber Eats."
With so much competition for bookings, even self-described "high-end" escorts — "posh English girls with premium high rates," as Charlotte puts it — were forced to adapt. "Even those of us on AdultWork dropped our rates to ensure we got bookings," she says.
While £1,000 to £3,000 a week may seem like good money to many, Charlotte argues that the nature of sex work — which she describes as intrinsically "violent" and often dangerous — warrants a higher rate of return. "Sex work should be high reward and high payoff money-wise, because a lot of us suffer in doing this work," she says. "It's about survival, getting enough money to survive. I would never in a million years want to sleep with any of these men. I wanted to be paid insanely well."
Many of the women I spoke with initially saw sex work as a loophole in the labor market where, if you hustled hard enough, you could achieve financial autonomy faster than traditional jobs allow. For a generation raised on self-branding and self-reliance, it promised flexibility, autonomy, and a lot of money — a kind of shortcut to the American dream.
But the slowdown shows that sex work is governed by the same market forces as any other sector. A study at the University of Chicago examined prostitution after the 2008 recession and found that it " is more sensitive to changes in unemployment, income, or other macro factors that decrease consumer demand." In other words, when the economy contracts, so does the sex industry.
For some, the easy money from the boom days has changed their view of pursuing other kinds of work. Asia de la Rosa was 15 when the pandemic began and started selling foot pics and catfishing content on Snapchat. She began making "the most money I've ever touched in my life" — $45,000 in one summer. Eventually, the app cracked down on sex work and banned her profile, but the money changed her view on life. Now 20 and working in a bodega in Manhattan for $16 an hour, she is uninterested in pursuing a conventional career. "Seeing how much money I made, going back to regular work — it's like, 'That's not my worth,'" she says. She still occasionally sells foot pictures to fetishists on the side.
Alex is also uninterested in going back on the job market; she's having a good time and earning up to £10,000 a month. She's able to weather the effects of saturation, because "clients who like me, still like me," she says. She plans to keep escorting until she's 35 — maybe longer. "I give people a lot of joy, and I'd feel bad for them if I was to stop." If she pivots in the future, she could imagine starting her own business or working for herself.
For those who aren't starting their own ventures, the tough job market is making it increasingly difficult to transition out of sex work. Zoe, who's 32 and has been in and out of the industry for a decade, worries that her decision to go into sex work may cost her in the long run. "How am I going to explain two years out of work on my CV?" she asks. She puts "client relations" on her résumé, but when recruiters ask for examples, she's stumped. "I can't say, 'I do dinner dates with executives from Google.'"
Maria also worries about her ability to transition into more conventional work in her 30s. "When I got into the industry, I didn't have any career goals. I've always been a 'live in the moment' kind of person — do what makes you happy right now — and stripping fit that mentality. But after living in the present for maybe a bit too long, I've realized I haven't really figured out what I want to do. So in that sense, stripping may have held me back."
Melissa Ditmore, who has researched the sex work industry in the US, says this dynamic is typical these days. "Some of this is related to youth," she says. "But some of it is structural — career planning is harder in today's labor market, with traditional paths to upward mobility shrinking."
Hannah's lifestyle now depends on a stripper's income, and for the time being, she sees it as a better option than returning to a 9-to-5. She launched a clothing brand last year with the hope that it would eventually allow her to leave the industry — "sex work is a really good way to learn how to manage a business, as businesses are very unpredictable." But she isn't optimistic about getting out anytime soon.
Megan Robinson is a freelance writer covering culture, intimacy, and labor. She's also an editor at Dough! magazine, where she writes about the intersection of culture and economics.