What Happened to CityVibe?
At one time, CityVibe was the most safe and reputable place to find NSA fun. Ads were open and honest. You could easily find reviews of the girls and services you see advertised. You never got a bad experience or felt cheated. CityVibe served a great purpose and helped make the sex industry a cleaner, safer place. Unfortunately, because of despicable crimes like human trafficking and forced prostitution, places like CityVibe don’t last long. We are so new to the fight against human trafficking, many of the laws and bills we have enabled are not working as we hoped, but instead making things worse. CityVibe, and other sites like it, have paid the price for this inexperience.
First Signs of Trouble for CityVibe
CityVibe was once the go-to place for a night with a beautiful escort. You could be safe and confident in your exchange and feel good about the whole experience. It was easy to find the perfect date amid all the large glossy photo ads. The first sign of trouble in what happened to CityVibe was their redesign. Twitter was ablaze in early 2013 when users began to log on to find CityVibe looked exactly like Backpage.com. In an effort to be less conspicuous and not seem to be aiding in the sex trade, they revamped the sight and users had to slog through ads for auto sales and home rentals to find an escort ad. Not only that, but their VIP ads were the most heavily pushed. Users didn’t appreciate all the new changes.
Legal Trouble Didn’t Help What Happened to CityVibe
Next on the horizon was some legal trouble for CityVibe when they were sued by Slixa, the company whose VIP ads CityVibe copied theirs from. When news began to spread, many users thought they were being sued by Backpage for the obvious rip-off of their format, or by the review company that they modeled their review page after. Slixa is newcomer to escort advertising and their taking the industry by storm and earning a ton of good will in the escort industry.
Competition Wiped Them Out
With sites like Slixa and Eros catering to upscale escorts CityVibe was losing its appeal. It was to hard to dredge through the sludge to find what you were looking for. Eros ran the show for many years, being the only site to showcase upscale escorts. The one downside was the links to cam girls and other sites. The escorts placing the pricey ads on Eros were none to please at the leads off the site. Slixa came along and realized it was a bad idea and added new features to keep users on the site longer. The gave escorts more bang for their advertising buck, which kept customers forever coming back.
Human Trafficking Bills
Recent laws and bill put into effect to fight human trafficking have had a harsh effect on the women who chose to engage in the sex trade for a living. It goes without saying that the trafficking of young women and children to sell for sex must be stopped, but the current plan will not curb the epidemic. Websites like Craig’s List, Backpage and others were shut down by the government for enabling ads pertaining to sex trafficking. Escorts have had to seek out other ways to advertise and customers other places to find their dates. Traffickers have simply went on to other methods. Placing both the independent sex worker and the victim of trafficking in more danger.
No one knows for sure what happened to CityVibe. They went through a lot of internal changes which all turned out to be copied from other, similar sites. None of the changes worked and they were losing customers on both sides of the fence. Slixa was seeking a court order to remove CityVibe’s duplicate pages and to stop all further infringement. They demanded CityVibe terminate using Slixa’s branded design. Slixa also demanded compensation from CityVibe for legal fees and further restitution to be decided by the court. It seems that CityVibe just ran into more bad luck than they could handle. Along with some bad internal structure changes and disastrous management decisions, CityVibe could longer hold up.