Chapter 1: 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.
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Chapter 2: 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? Turns that lead to unexpected places? Like those murky transactions that Kelly Holland talked about. What were they for? What were they hiding? Who or what is behind the business of porn? And you know what?
The Financial Times, we call it the FT, they encouraged me to keep going, to report this out. And my boss? He got sucked in too.
That's me, Alex Barker. I manage Patricia's team of business reporters, but my main job is writing about the media industry. The Murdochs, Netflix, that kind of thing. When Patricia asked to look into porn, I knew it wasn't exactly the FT's cup of tea. But it was different and intriguing and only career-threatening if we really botched it up. So I said, sure, see what you can find.
And bit by bit, this story of the power behind porn drew me in too. It started with a routine email from Patricia, a little update on her reporting with a bombshell buried halfway down. She said, I think I found the secret owner of the world's biggest porn company. And she had. But it was just the first turn in that maze.
Once we started following the leads, we soon realised we weren't just tracking one man or one company, but power. And that's when I really got hooked. Because this industry has outsized influence, truly enormous, over our culture, over the way my kids learn about sex, over almost 8% of all internet traffic.
So as journalists, we decided to give the subject the time it deserves. We'd report on the business of porn in the kind of way the FT would report on any other industry. We wanted to work out who made online porn what it is today, understand who the real decision makers are, what's driving their choices. Basically, to work out who rules porn.
We spent months roving around. We interviewed bankers, porn stars, bankers who became porn stars, even a New York billionaire who helped change the industry with one text message.
And after all that, we found some answers. A way out of the great maze of porn land to a place we definitely didn't expect to end up.
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Chapter 3: How did the internet change the porn industry landscape?
But there are some strange people in the world who will fetishize those details and then message me about it. And it makes me feel gross. So I just have a blackout before I turned 18. Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Stoja is not afraid to speak her mind, or step on toes, whether they belong to a porn kingpin or a news reporter. At this stage, what we really wanted to speak to Stoja about were her early years in the industry. A time when online video streaming changed the porn industry forever.
I started out first, I was go-go dancing. Then I was posing for alternative nude sites. And then I signed a contract to be a performer in hardcore video with a studio called Digital Playground. Hi, I'm Stoya. Now we're going to very quietly... go to a hotel and have sex on camera, which sounds like shooting a porn, which is not anything I would ever, ever do.
This is vacation travel.
Now, back then in 2007, this was a big thing. Hardcore studios like Digital Playground shoot graphic sex. But much like the old Hollywood studio system, they had contract stars. The performers were literally paid not to work for anybody else. The fact this happened at all was a sign of the times. The internet was bringing porn into millions of homes, but it was mainly images or grainy video.
So consumers still wanted the studio stuff. The online business coexisted with the old industry. Porn DVDs were selling by the truckload. Studios were producing lots of features and still largely calling the shots. Everyone was busy and working hard, but Stoyer's work? That took place in her physical body.
I did a lot of acting where the pages were being pushed under the door hot off the printer as I was going through the enema process to be prepared to do my actual sex scene. When you consider the working conditions for the cast and crew, I'm actually quite impressed by what we managed to do.
Stoia even starred in one of the most expensive studio porn movies ever made, Pirates 2, Stagnetti's Revenge. It took weeks to shoot on a specially made pirate ship, decked out with cannons, a crow's nest, and some suspiciously comfy furniture in the galley. There were dozens of cast and crew, and it reportedly cost millions of dollars. It's not the name that brings a man infamy.
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