A Harvard alum in Kink’s marketing department worked in restaurants after moving to San Francisco and got his first adult-industry job after searching for the word “fun” on Craigslist. A young woman who calls herself Cat Rich told me that she volunteered as a civilian nurse in Iraq after graduation but wound up back in Indiana selling cars she is now Kink’s events coordinator. Talking with Kink’s 70 employees, the majority of whom are in their 20s or 30s, it would seem that porn has become just another career that creative people latch onto in the fog following college - years spent meandering between unpaid internships and dispiriting corporations, lashed with debt. If anything, Kink may be an exaggerated example of just how ordinary pornographers will get, despite the wince-inducing grisliness of its content, which even by porn-industry standards is morbidly eccentric. That is, as pornography becomes a more mainstream product, it becomes an equally mainstream career. With the Internet pushing porn discreetly into the homes of conventional consumers, making it more a part of everyday life and less seedy-seeming, the industry has been better able than ever to attract that sort of employee. But succeeding on the Web, or simply surviving its escalating demands, has required more sophisticated entrepreneurial types. It has long been noted that the San Fernando Valley is increasingly populated by strait-laced corporate managers and not by the oily, medallion-wearing men we once assumed. Many of the sites that have lasted, she adds, were founded, like Kink, by serious-minded, tech-oriented entrepreneurs working outside the influence of the porn establishment. “You can’t just throw up an adult Web site and watch the dollars roll in anymore,” says Kathee Brewer, editor of the trade magazine AVN Online, which covers the online adult industry. But just as quickly, the disarray of those early days soon constricted into a fiercely competitive, $3-billion-a-year American industry.
With the big companies of the San Fernando Valley - the center of pornographic video production - moving online sluggishly, if at all, a disparate crowd of upstarts was getting rich quickly. His mother worried that the lifestyle of a self-employed Web master might get lonely.Īt the time, online porn was still an unruly if lucrative amateur hour.
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In 1998, Acworth dropped out of grad school and moved to San Francisco, which he had always regarded as the world’s “fetish capital,” to run Hogtied full time. Almost immediately, Hogtied made several hundred dollars a day - then, with a few ads in place, more than a thousand. He purchased licensed digital photographs for content, many of which were simply old bondage-magazine spreads, torn out and scanned. Acworth founded Kink’s first site, Hogtied, while still at Columbia. Kink has 60,000 subscribers access to each site costs about $30 a month. “So I basically just ripped off that idea.”Īcworth has since built what is arguably the country’s most successful fetish porn company, - a fast-growing suite of 10 S-and-M and bondage-themed Web sites, each updated weekly with a new half-hour or hour video segment. “He had made a quarter of a million pounds over a short period doing nothing very clever at all,” Acworth told me not long ago, pointing to the clipping framed in his office in downtown San Francisco. Then, after his first year, he read in a British tabloid about a fireman who sold pornographic pictures on the Internet. He had already worked for Baring Brothers in London and was on track to do analytical research on Wall Street. He grew up in the English Midlands, the son of a sculptor and a former Jesuit priest, and came to the United States in 1996 to get a Ph.D. Peter Acworth is 36 and trim, with a pale, boyish face.