Tara* had struck gold. After spending a lazy Saturday afternoon browsing through the dating app she was currently experimenting with, she hit it off with a nice-sounding guy, and the two exchanged real names and numbers. She found herself Googling Stuart*, a Brit living in Amsterdam. He worked at a startup; he was visiting New York on business. “I was like, oh, he’s kind of cute…”
Neither had plans that night, so they started figuring out where they could meet up for a drink. When Tara suggested a restaurant in midtown Manhattan, Stuart was into it: “Okay cool, my hotel is super close to there,” he messaged back. The mention of the hotel gave Tara pause, and she asked him what exactly he had in mind. “We can go back after and have some fun,” he said.
Tara hesitated. This guy seemed nice and normal and safe and she was down for a fun night out with a visiting stranger, but she drew a hard line when it came to sex on the first date. “I was like, ‘Listen, I don’t know who you’ve met [on this app], but I’m not going to fuck you, I’m sorry,’” she says. Her match was taken aback. “Oh,” he responded. “I thought that was the expectation.”
These kinds of conflicting agendas will be familiar to anyone who’s done much Tindering or Bumbling or OkCupiding, where one person’s one-night stand is another person’s chance at finding The One. But Tara wasn’t using any of these apps. This was Ohlala, and Stuart had already agreed to pay Tara $600 for their date.
The Ohlala headquarters are located on a sleepy block in the Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood of Berlin, in an old prewar building one block from where the Wall once stood. Though you wouldn’t know it from walking down the pin-drop-quiet residential street, the neighborhood has become home to several startups including SoundCloud, which has an office a couple floors down from Ohlala.
When I arrive, there’s a mood of weary intensity among the eight or so team members present. Pia Poppenreiter, the company’s CEO, stands and greets me with a rushed hug. “You picked a great day to visit,” she says, in a voice that suggests more cigarettes than hours of sleep. “Search ‘hashtag escortgate’ on Twitter.” I do so as we step out to the balcony and she lights up a Marlboro Red. A pink Ohlala banner tied to the railing billows silently behind her.
Launched in August 2015, Ohlala is a web-based app that facilitates what it calls “instant paid dating.” Male users post offers for dates, consisting of a time, a duration, and how much money they’re willing to pay — a typical offer is from 1–4 hours at an average price of $300. While the request is up, women can decide whether or not they’d like that person to be able to contact them. Crucially, women are not visible to men before they initiate conversation — it’s the inverse of the backpage listings to which it’s often compared. Here, the buyers must come forward first. From there, the couple can chat and discuss the whens and wheres of their impending dates, as well as a payment method and their boundaries, if they so please. (In-app payment is currently in the works, the team tells me.) When the terms are agreed upon, the chat is logged, and presumably both parties are incentivized to show up. Though its on-demand model has earned Ohlala the label “Uber for escorts,” the company insists it isn’t an escort agency, or even operating in the adult entertainment space.
As I scrolled through the largely German #escortgate hashtag, one Bing translation at a time, I started to piece together an unraveling scandal. That week Berlin had been host to the NOAH Conference, an invite-only event comparable to Code Conference or Disrupt back in the States. According to multiple reports, the gala party two nights earlier had been characterized by a high number of “attractive, glamorously dressed women” who flirted aggressively with the male attendees and handed out business cards. It was concluded that these women were escorts, and that they had come to the party at the behest of Ohlala. Several women were rumored to be carrying credit card readers.
Glued to her Twitter feed as we sit on the deck, Poppenreiter dismisses the credit card part, at least, as “ridiculous.” But, she says, “It’s true, to some extent. We did invite people [to the NOAH party], but it was more my friends.” Her all-female guerrilla marketing team were dressed up, sure; it was a party, after all. Several in the group were Ohlala users, but Poppenreiter puts those numbers in the low single digits. Poppenreiter herself did not join them. “I was exhausted, I was at the conference the whole day.”
There’s no question the group was pulling off a stunt. A leaked Facebook invitation for the party-within-a-party encouraged invitees to “grab a drink and mingle with men who crave the finer things in life.” A publicity stunt involving a controversial app doesn’t sound like the stuff of trending topics, until you consider NOAH’s abysmal female attendance rate — at this year’s event, only 11 out of its 108 speakers were women. The presence of escorts at the evening events have long been a wink-wink assumption. By symbolically associating themselves with these women, Ohlala’s party crashers made the company a scapegoat for these rumors. But they also got people’s attention.
Poppenreiter had already released a statement earlier in the day in response to the outcry, apologizing for letting things “get out of hand.” But part of me can’t help but wonder if this was exactly what she had planned.
