From The Kink Machine: The Secret Power Behind Porn
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What is the hidden business behind the porn industry?
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Hey listeners, I'm Alex Barker, a journalist with the Financial Times. A few years ago, my fellow reporter Patricia Nilsson and I spent six months looking at how money flows in the porn industry. We gathered our findings in a new audiobook, The Kink Machine, The Hidden Business of Adult Entertainment, and today I'm dropping into your feed to share a preview. Patricia and I quickly learned that while performers are required to literally bear it all, information about the people and businesses who run this industry are kept undercover like a state secret. We started to find a power structure that includes billionaires, tech geniuses and the most powerful finance companies in the world. It's a story about control, influence and an industry with staggering cultural reach.
If you want to hear more, find The Kink Machine, the hidden business of adult entertainment at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever you get your audiobooks.
How did it feel to you to be taken over by a company that no one knew anything about?
Well, the deeper I got into it, the more concerned I became about just the general level of secrecy around the company. The money has to move, sometimes from a personal account, sometimes from a business account. That sounded a bit sketchy to me. If you play that fast and loose in that environment, I have to assume that you're playing that fast and loose in every environment. That environment she's talking about? It's pornography. Kelly Holland would know. She's been a fixture of the porn industry since the 90s. She even ran one of its most famous brands, Penthouse. That is, until she lost it to a mystery investor. And for the industry at large, does it matter that you have these conglomerates that are buying loads of the industry and we don't really know who owns these companies?
I don't think it's healthy. I think it's very problematic. It's healthy for somebody's bottom line and it's healthy for shareholders, but I don't think it's healthy for clients, consumers and consumers. the general climate. You know, you can make a choice in business to be friendly competitors, which is the healthiest way to go and the most profitable way to go, or you can be enemies.
I'm Patricia Nelson, and I'm a reporter for the Financial Times. I write about business. Some days it's a fashion chain, on others it's tobacco or a cannabis startup. But recently... My job has mainly involved porn. I started writing about the industry about three years ago, but I have to admit, this last year it's become an obsession. Business papers don't usually write about the porn industry, even though it basically owns a big corner of the internet. That in itself made me curious. Why wouldn't we write about porn, just like we do with any other legal industry? And I think it's because no one really likes to talk about porn. We're embarrassed to. Even though most of us watched it at some point, it's taboo.
And so I started where any business reporter would. This is just an industry with companies, right?
Who are the key power players in the adult entertainment industry?
I can normally figure out who the owners are, how much money they make, how they're regulated. But porn? It turned out that porn was a world apart. The whole industry depends on performers to literally bear it all. But basic information about the businesses who run the industry are kept like a state secret. I kept finding names that weren't names and companies that weren't companies. It often felt like I was wandering around a maze. You know that strange sense of never knowing where you're heading or how anything's connected?
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