Peter Acworth: Founder of Kink.com and the San Francisco Armory Studio

Peter Thomas Acworth was born on 12 October 1970. He is a British web entrepreneur based in San Francisco and the founder of Kink.com. In the broadband years that company became the name attached to professionally produced BDSM and fetish video. What he built was a studio system: consent talk that viewers could see, a stack of niche sites, and production at an industrial scale. The San Francisco Bay Guardian summed up his principles as “intimate, conversational, playful, and mutually enjoyable interactions.” He has said a product line should grow from “an individual’s actual fantasies.”

He was born in Derbyshire. One parent was a sculptor and the other a Jesuit priest. He studied mathematics at the University of Cambridge, management at HEC Paris, and then entered a finance PhD at Columbia University. He moved into pornography after reading a British tabloid story about a firefighter who made £250,000 quickly with an internet porn site. He already had a long interest in bondage, so he aimed the site at BDSM. The first property, Hogtied, licensed footage from other bondage producers. He soon left graduate school and ran the business full-time.

In 1998 he moved from New York to San Francisco. Sales flattened because competitors were using the same licensed libraries, so he started shooting original scenes. Early on he performed himself. Models came through Craigslist and through photographer friends. In 2000 he launched a second site, Fucking Machines, under Cybernet Entertainment, Inc., the company behind Hogtied.com. More niche sites followed. In 2006 he rebranded the company as Kink.com and locked the house name to the subcultural word that defined it.

Late in 2006 Acworth announced that he had bought the San Francisco Armory for headquarters and a film studio. He sold Kink.com’s office at 942 Mission Street for $6.5 million, more than double what he had paid four years earlier. The San Francisco Business Times noted that, since arriving in 1998, he had also made large real-estate profits on a home in the Marina and on Hogtied’s original studios on 8th Street. He told the press he would not buy more San Francisco property: “All of our real estate profits are in the Armory.” Neighbors protested a porn studio moving into the landmark. The San Francisco Chronicle later wrote that he won praise for restoring the brick Moorish castle, which had stood empty for a long time. In 2018, after several years of falling revenue at Kink.com, the building sold for $65 million.

As of 2008 he still performed occasionally in Kink.com projects while serving as CEO. In 2018 longtime colleague Alison Boden replaced him as CEO so he could work on personal projects. He returned as CEO in 2021. In February 2013 he was arrested for obstruction of justice. Police were investigating reports of gunfire in the Armory’s historic shooting range and said he had delayed them. Officers also found about a gram of cocaine on him and added a possession charge. All charges were later dropped.

Kink.com’s model was niche sites, negotiation in front of the camera, professional bondage and fetish production, and San Francisco scale. Related records include the 2013 documentary Kink and the interview series The Kink Kronikles. Praise for the on-camera consent style and criticism of the labor politics both still land on the same founder. He is the Cambridge mathematics student, the Columbia finance dropout, the Hogtied experimenter, the Armory’s landlord, and the CEO who stepped out and came back at the company that turned “kink” into a global URL.