KittyAds

Somebody sent me a link to Kitty Ads this morning, and I could barely contain my excitement. I’d been meaning to adopt a feline companion for some time now, a furry, purring little thing to keep me company since I’m no longer allowed to bring my laptop to Starbucks after the last incident. Imagine my surprise when the website wasn’t a directory of clawed animals waiting to be adopted, but of adult humans waiting to be fucked. Fortunately, it looks like there are more than a few cougars that might be down for some petting later…

That’s right, ladies and gentlemen: KittyAds.com is a free directory of adult classified ads. The site’s been around for a few years and gets hundreds of thousands of visitors per month. It seems like a healthy volume of traffic, but the question with escort sites is how well those numbers translate to selection in your area. I’ve still got a few more days before my next visit from a pornstar on the PornDudeCasting couch, so it seemed like a good moment to go looking for a new friend—at least for the evening.

Craiglist-Style Adult Ads for a New Era

Like much of the competition, the front page of KittyAds is broken down by location. Technically, they’re a worldwide site, with sections devoted to Africa, Latin America, Europe and other corners of the globe. In actual practice, though, most areas don’t get enough action for the site to be of much use.

It ain’t all bad news, though. They do have thousands of ads in the USA, hundreds in Canada, and a handful scattered around the world. There’s currently just one ad from Africa and 44 across Europe, but Americans have 10,000 to choose from.

I was worried, however, that many of those listings were going to be stale. They tell you out front how many of the escorts in any region are online, and that included just over 500 of those 10,000 workers in the US. I did a little digging into the KittyAds Help page and found some relieving information. Turns out, classified ads are automatically deleted after a month, which should minimize the number of useless, outdated postings.

Once you start looking through listings in individual cities, it does seem like the numbers don’t add up. If cities like Atlanta, Houston, Los Angeles and Denver have thousands of ads each, how does the USA only have 10,000 total? Turns out, Kitty Ads also offers permanent profiles which can be pulled up via the Escort Search, Client Search or by city. It’s a little complicated, but hopefully it makes the actual search a little easier.

Sliding into Those Escort DMs

I’m whipping up this review on a Wednesday afternoon, and there are currently only 4 local escorts online. That’s almost as big a bummer as the missing distance filter, but I did find a silver lining. KittyAds.com has an internal messaging system, a real rarity among this type of site. There’s a sexy chick named Kate with a Verified badge who’s online right now and not far from me, so I can slide right into those DMs on the site itself.

Some of you don’t want to create an account on an escort site, and yeah, I get it. Who wants a paper trail for anything, let alone a lady of the night? If you don’t want to use the internal messaging system, you can always go the old-school route. Contact info is listed plainly, and you don’t even need a KittyAds account to see it. Kate’s got her phone number and Gmail address listed, so I’ve got options even if she goes offline.

The Kitty Ads themselves can get pretty explicit, including naughty pics. A lot of these sites make you learn a bunch of secret code and acronyms, but Kate’s posted ads where she explains in clear-ass English that she’s down to give you the GFE, sit on your face and do bareback anal. Kate’s photo spread ain’t quite as raunchy as some of the other kitties around here, but she’s smoking hot and I’d love to see more of her.

How I Met Your Mother

A handful of fresh Chicago ads have been posted today, offering hookups, fetish fun and respectful, classy ladies. Because of the clunky, text-based navigation, I can’t see what any of these chicks look like until I click through to read the whole ad. I understand that they’re shooting for the old-school Craigslist aesthetic, but this is just bad design for an escort directory. Despite what they say, covers are one of the best ways to judge a book.

There is some other highly relevant info listed beside the ad titles, though. A couple of the recent ads have that Verified badge I mentioned earlier, and they’ve all got a KATS score. Kitty Ads has a trust ranking system called KATS, which can help you figure out how safe an ad is. The number is based on verified IDs, supplied information, user votes and user reviews.

Oh, and let’s talk about those reviews. This has become one of my major make-or-break features for escort sites in recent years, because really, do you ever buy anything off the internet without reading reviews first? KittyAds goes even further with the feature than the other guys, because reviews aren’t posted until they’re examined and verified by staff. Users have to fill out the full 3-page form and then both parties are contacted, a much more stringent process than the usual “type it and we’ll post it” method.

For the life of me, I have no idea why the KATS score ain’t included as a search filter, nor are verification badges or user reviews. These are great features that I wish I’d see implemented everywhere, but I feel like they’re almost going to waste with the overall lackluster interface. I did a User Search for a Chicago zip code and pulled up nearly 150,000 users, without many options for whittling down that selection. This fucks everyone, from the escorts and clients who can’t find each other, to the webmasters who are going to lose traffic to better platforms.

That said, I wouldn’t go as far as saying KittyAds.com is a bad website. I see what they’re going for with the design, but the Craigslist-style presentation does more to cripple the website than entice users. If you can get past that outdated interface, though, the trust rankings and verified user reviews really are some of the best features I’ve seen lately on an escort site. The world’s oldest industry has always been a breeding ground for scams, and this ugly website just so happens to offer some of the better protections against them.