Introducing 'The Kink Machine: The Hidden Business of Pleasure'

·31 min·2 clips

Stoya explains how free tube sites devalued porn and exposed performers to body-shaming and theft.

1. FT News Briefing releases a preview episode for 'The Kink Machine: The Hidden Business of Adult Entertainment,' an audiobook produced by Pushkin Industries and the Financial Times, authored by reporters Patricia Nilsson and Alex Barker. 2. Patricia Nilsson is a business reporter at the FT who had been covering the porn industry for approximately three years before the project; Alex Barker manages her team and specializes in media-industry reporting, covering subjects such as the Murdochs and Netflix. 3. The episode's core argument is that the porn industry operates with the economic scale of a major media sector — nearly 8% of all internet traffic — but with a deliberate culture of opacity that prevents standard business journalism from identifying its owners or financial flows. 4. Kelly Holland, a former operator of Penthouse, opens the episode describing her discomfort when her company was acquired by an anonymous mystery investor, and questioning whether opaque conglomerate ownership is healthy for consumers and the industry. 5. Performer Stoya (legal name Jessica) serves as the episode's primary narrator across three acts; she has won adult industry awards, published columns in The New York Times, written a book, and run literary book clubs. 6. Stoya describes the pre-2009 era of contract studios like Digital Playground, where performers were paid exclusivity fees and studios produced high-budget features — including 'Pirates 2: Stagnetti's Revenge,' reportedly one of the most expensive porn films ever made, shot on a purpose-built pirate ship. 7. Around 2009, free tube sites destroyed the DVD sales model: consumers migrated to streaming platforms like Pornhub and YouPorn, which hosted pirated content under the same legal loophole as general social media — they were not liable for user uploads and only had to respond to takedown requests. 8. Curtis Potech, a former strip club DJ, became an early operator of Xtube in 2006, a tube site funded by a mysterious Chinese investor he knew only as 'Mr. X'; Xtube grew from 200,000 to over half a million users in a single week after finding its niche in gay porn. 9. Xtube became so controversial that it received subpoenas constantly and a competing site called YouPorn received an actual bullet in the mail with the site's name etched into it; Xtube itself nearly collapsed after a half-million-dollar legal settlement with a producer over pirated content. 10. Curtis recounts selling Xtube for $35 million to a buyer who said simply 'sure, I'll be there next week'; the buyer was Fabian Tillman, a German software engineer who Curtis says was 'basically setting up the takeover of the adult industry.' 11. Manwin, which owned PornHub and other tube sites, then began acquiring production studios, including Digital Playground (Stoya's studio), Playboy rights, and other properties, in a consolidation Stoya compares to 'Disney buying Pixar.' 12. Stoya describes the asymmetry facing performers: tube sites prospered by hosting pirated content, devalued the market for paid porn, and then acquired the studios, leaving performers with no recourse and body-shaming descriptions of their work posted without consent. 13. Pornhub allegedly approached studios with an arrangement Stoya and others describe as 'a gun to the head situation': accept a deal to post trailers and receive traffic assistance, or deal with pirated content on your own. 14. The episode identifies a structural problem with tube site accountability: the average visit lasts eight minutes, reducing the commercial incentive to convert viewers to paid subscribers and making ad revenue the primary model. 15. Stoya states that the same lack of accountability that allowed pirated studio content to proliferate also applied to illegal material — revenge porn and content involving minors — because 'if your video was on one of the sites and you didn't want it there, you had a problem, not the tube sites.' 16. The power asymmetry is stated plainly by Stoya: she is recognized in public even while masked, while tube site owners are 'reclusive and not publicly held to account,' and she questions why they use shell corporations in jurisdictions she associates with financial opacity. 17. The episode's tone is investigative journalism: measured, citation-dense, built on named sources and on-record interviews, with Stoya's first-person account providing emotional texture around data points. 18. The format alternates between Nilsson and Barker narrating and interviewing, with Stoya and Curtis Potech giving extended first-person testimony; this is an audiobook preview, not a standalone episode, so it ends with a direct call to action. 19. The episode will appeal to listeners interested in business journalism, media industry consolidation, sex-work labor rights, or the intersection of tech platforms and legacy-industry disruption. 20. Listeners looking for a complete investigation rather than a promotional preview, or those uncomfortable with frank discussion of the pornography business, are unlikely to find this satisfying on its own.

As heard by us

Investigative business reporting that traces how secrecy and money shape the adult industry.

The Financial Times preview keeps its eye on where the money goes and who stays out of sight while performers remain visible. After six months of reporting, it treats the adult industry less as a spectacle than as a system, with billionaires, tech geniuses, and major finance…

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Why you'd press play

You want the money trail behind porn, not the usual tabloid angle.

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