The kink.com site has a new CEO. As covered in this Vice article, Alison Boden has replaced Peter Acworth. I’m happy to see a woman get the top job at a very high profile kinky porn producer and, an engineer myself, I’m particularly happy to see that she got there via a technology background. She started as a software engineer and was their VP of technology prior to the CEO job. It’s frequently the finance, marketing or product management people who get the fast track to the top job. Given the lack of female software engineers in general, and in top positions in particular, it’s great to see one heading a company like kink.com.
These images feature Lorilei Lee shooting for Kink’s Divine Bitches site.
Here’s hoping that she can bring Kink back from the brink. Sadly, I don’t think that’s going to happen, but I’ll have my fingers crossed.
As the article says, the company has moved to a ‘distribution model’. Last time I was a member, that seemed to mean that they were buying up lots of mostly low-quality shoots from other sites to pad out the fall-off in production from their in-house stuff. The previously ‘in-house’, core sites have also declined in quality – while it’s still possible to see a competently produced Hogtied or Device Bondage shoot, the loss of the armory sets and equipment seems to hit production hard. The willingness and ability to break the mold or try new things seems to have bled out of the company – most of what they produce now is just by-the-numbers porn shoots.
This is really a shame, because what Kink used to be known for was doing high-quality shoots that centred on topics that no one else really touched. If you look back to the now-distant mid-2000’s, the quality of Kink productions – in terms of lighting, camera work, etc. – was on a totally different level than the ‘a guy, a girl and a couch’ shoots that made up pretty much the rest of the internet at the time. Photos from Kink shoots from way back yonder still make the rounds on the blogosphere and tumblrverse precisely because of their higher production values.
Kink sub-sites were, at their height, more than a decade ago, occupying a niche that no one else could fill. I remember Men in Pain / Divine Bitches as, for a long time, being really the only place on the entire internet, where femdom-style shoots were being produced to the same level of quality as more mainstream content. Sure, other places were producing femdom material at the same time, but no one else was doing so on custom-built sets, with a large wardrobe and equipment inventory, and – at least, more often than not – with actors and actresses who possessed relevant skills and enthusiasm for the content.
Kink used have a large pool of highly skilled talent to draw upon. For instance, on the femdom side of things, there were actresses such as Princess Donna, Claire Adams, Sandra Romain, and as you depict above, Lorelei Lee. These were people with a wealth of expertise in doing BDSM and femdom scenes, and it made an enormous difference on screen, when compared to trying to stick a newbie into the same role. As these people departed the industry, there doesn’t seem to have been adequate investment on Kink’s part in order to cultivate and retain new talent. I can’t speak for what’s happening behind the camera, but I suspect that there is a similar ‘brain drain’ going on there as well. One wonders what will happen to the site when the remaining regulars finally decide to pack it in.
The rise of tube sites has been a pain for premium porn producers, but I think the real problem for Kink is the rise of things like Clips4Sale and ManyVids. Kink used to be pretty much the sole king of fetish pornography, but nowadays, there are hundreds, if not thousands of small-scale producers in the industry. There’s quite a bit of femdom content being released every day; only a fraction is as well-made as what Kink could release in its hayday, but it’s a lot more focused. If you like, say, forced-bi content, you can just go out and buy some, instead of buying a subscription to Divine Bitches and crossing your fingers that they’d be releasing something featuring that this week. And with a lot of Dommes operating their own clip-stores, you can watch a professional in action, rather than hope that this week’s mainstream porn actress is better in a femdom role than last week’s.
Kink seems to be trying to fight this by emphasizing quantity over quality, which is, by my reading, a terrible and tragic mistake. If Kink.com simply becomes an assemblage of variable-quality content hastily thrown together from third-party producers, then there will be little, if anything, to distinguish having a subscription there from the experience of simply browsing Clips4Sale, or seeing what you can randomly find on PornHub. The measures taken to safeguard the future of the company seem to be accelerating, rather than halting, the trends that are leading to it’s decline.
It’s tragic, because Kink once stood as a kind of beacon in the BDSM and fetish world. By producing BDSM content that simultaneously had high production values (by adult standards, of course), I think it served to make BDSM much more well known and much more positively regarded. It’s a real shame to see this going away.
In any event, I don’t want to distract away from the good news of having a female CEO at the helm – I feel that it’s a long overdue step for the company. But, seeing where the company has been trending over these last few years, I doubt that the new leadership will be able to arrest the decline of this once-proud titan of the adult industry.
It’s a tricky and complicated issue. I tend to agree with you that what distinguished the kink.com sites was the quality of their product. It was clearly still very commercial and didn’t really capture all the nuance of kinky play, but the actors, equipment, outfits, production values, etc. were all top notch. At least in comparison to what came before them. I think there were one of the first companies to show actual complex BDSM scenes, with things like electrical play, zippers, CBT, breath play, heavy bondage, etc. Before them there was a lot of crappy bondage and a very narrow focus on things like spanking and caning.
At the same time, I have to acknowledge that they know their market, and their cost structure. If people will not pay, then they have to adapt as best they can. Everyone wants well made content, but only a fraction of people are willing to pay for it.
I have to admit that I was disappointed that when they sold the armory they chose to also sell off all the equipment and sets. Given the crazy SF real estate market, I could totally understand them selling the building off. But it would have been great if they’d then used that money to relocate the sets to somewhere much cheaper (say an industrial park in Reno or Las Vegas) and created a new focal point for performers wanting to make kinky content. They were one of the few companies with the kind of influence to be able to do that, and I’d have thought there were other ways to address their cost structure issues without compromising quality. However, like I said, they certainly know their business model better than I do.
As I wrote last year (http://www.femdom-resource.com/2017/01/21/doubling-up-on-dungeons/ ) I think it would have been an interesting model for them to offer space for filming to other BDSM professionals. So do the distribution and the infrastructure, but outsource the talent and the creative side. That’d either give them cheaper content (if they did the distribution) or subsidize the sets and equipment (if dommes prefered to sell it themselves).
-paltego