Online Pornography – Kink.com – Peter Acworth – New York Times
At the time, online porn was still an unruly if lucrative amateur hour. 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. But just as quickly, the disarray of those early days soon constricted into a fiercely competitive, $3-billion-a-year American industry. “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. 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.