SAN FRANCISCO – When I first heard about Kink.com acquiring the Mission District Armory in San Francisco some years ago, I thought of the moment as a potential watershed for the progress of the American adult entertainment industry. A porn studio poised to operate (openly!) in a historic building like the Armory felt like an immediately visible indication of how much more socially-acceptable pornography had become in the U.S., a high-profile symbol of the industry’s ongoing professionalization and final emergence from its gray-market roots.
Ten years later, with Kink on the verge of relocating its content production to Las Vegas and reopening the Armory as a “mixed-use” facility, including potentially hosting concerts and parties, serving as office space and other applications, the Armory looks like a very different sort of metaphor — and perhaps a cautionary tale, as well.
“Porn is not nearly as profitable as it was,” Kink owner Peter Ackworth said in explaining the company’s upcoming shift. “We have had to change our business model.”
Rather than standing as a symbol of how far the porn industry has come, the Armory now represents — in a far more literal fashion — where the porn industry is going, which may well be a return to those aforementioned gray-market roots.
With the defeat of Proposition 60 (the notorious “condoms in porn initiative”) in the November election, I get the sense a lot of people in the industry think the idea of California regulating the porn industry was defeated right along with it. This isn’t the case, of course. Mandatory condom use in porn productions is still the law in the state, and studios that ignore the law likely will continue to incur fines and other repercussions of noncompliance.
The defeat of Prop 60 was good for all sorts of reasons, including that random Californians presumably won’t be filing lawsuits against porn producers left and right as they might have been able to do if the measure had passed. But the very fact studios are still pulling up stakes and bailing from California (Kink isn’t the only one, just among the higher profile to make the decision) suggests to me the defeat of Prop 60 was a momentary reprieve, not a decisive triumph.
Of course, government regulation and the lobbying of anti-porn activists haven’t been the driving force behind the decline in profitability cited by Ackworth. Widespread content piracy has been the primary vehicle of the industry’s demise — and it has been felt especially acutely by companies like Kink, for whom paid content sales were the lifeblood, a revenue stream not easily replaced by monetizing internet traffic in other ways.
While there are certain echoes of the days in which cash-bloated affiliate programs erected ludicrously lavish trade show booths then quickly disappeared, there’s an important distinction between those long-gone programs and the still-kicking Kink.
The garish display put on by those affiliate programs was often done with little behind it other than hope for future revenue, whereas Kink acquired the Armory after already establishing strong revenue streams. As such, Kink didn’t make a “mistake” in acquiring the Armory; it simply didn’t foresee the coming disruption of the consumer market for porn and how such would impact the company’s bottom line — a lack of prescience I think it’s fair to say was commonplace in the industry at the time.
While I’m ignorant of the details, a cursory reading of Ackworth’s plans for the Armory leads me to believe the outcome will be just fine from a money-generating perspective, possibly even more lucrative than the abandoned notion of using the spot for content production. Still, I’m wistful for the way I felt when I first read about the acquisition of the property, nostalgic for the time when I saw it as an indicator of a bright future ahead, not just for Kink, but for the evolving nature of the adult industry itself.
Reading Ackworth’s comments, I get the sense he’s feeling pretty wistful right about now, too.
“It’s a little sad,” Ackworth said. “It’s the end of an era.”
It is, indeed.
