The markets that we don’t see

I counted 43 of them in the Hindustan Times this morning and 49 of them in The Times of India. They looked astoundingly similar. Plethora of mobile numbers, contact names that all sounded like they belonged to Ajit's girly sidekick in some movie, garish colours, all promising VIP service.

I am of course talking about those innumerable ads we flip past every morning for ''Escorts'', ''Masseuse'', et al.

So indulge me while I do some basic maths…with tons of assumptions.

On the basis of one such day, there were 127 such ads across 3 major papers in Mumbai. Average cost of each ad, let's say Rs3,000. That's Rs381,000 worth ads today. Let's assume such ads appear thrice a week. That's Rs1.14 million worth of weekly ads translating to Rs59.4 million of ads a year.

Let us further assume that the advertiser needs at least a three-time return on each ad. That would translate to Rs180 million worth of net business for the advertisers.

Assuming the advertisers' cut in the business is 25 per cent, (net of payment to actual service providers, etc), the total market size for these services would roughly equal Rs720 million! And, if we further assume that there would be a fair amount of repeat business (let's say 50 per cent) and that these ads represent only 50 per cent of all such ads in Mumbai (there being many other papers), the total market size is an astonishing Rs2,880 million! That's Rs 288 crore per year in Mumbai city alone!