CyberNet Entertainment (home of FuckingMachines, Hogtied, and host of other popular sites) has re-launched under the new moniker Kink.com and renewed the company’s commitment to providing quality fetish content.
According to company founder and President Peter Rogers, the new name more accurately reflects the company’s product, as well as its intentions. “CyberNet didn’t really encapsulate the company,” he says, adding that the name change will also clear up any confusion about his company’s relation to the similarly named CyberNet Ventures. “And there aren’t that many words that cover a broad range of fetishes. ‘Kink’ kind of says it all.”
Apparently, the idea to give the company a new identity had been brewing for some time. “We’ve been navigating for years with this issue nagging and nagging at us—CyberNet Entertainment is a really crappy name,” says company head of operations Tony Pirelli. “Just like anybody who starts a company, you don’t know what you’re going to become. But now that we produce some of the best-known and the most-trafficked fetish sites, a name like CyberNet Entertainment says absolutely nothing about bondage, nothing about S&M, nothing about FemDom, which is what we do.”
Snagging Kink.com as the new domain, however, wasn’t easy. CyberNet had to barter with National A-1, which acquired the name as part of a bulk domain purchase some years back. “That was a very long negotiation that took a couple months,” Pirelli recalls. What cinched the deal for the somewhat reluctant National A-1 was Rogers’ promise to let National feature some of CyberNet’s content on National’s HotMovies.com site in a two-year exclusive deal. “They wanted really good fetish material that was good enough to make them want to sell the domain name,” Pirelli says. “We’ve never published our material on any other site other than our own, but this works out great for us. We get the Kink.com domain, and we’re finally able to get our material [out there]. In fact, I think we should have done this quite a while ago.”
Pirelli says that the name change has given the company a new lease on life. “It’s going to change everything, the entire atmosphere and mood of the company, because now, finally, I think we have an identity,” he says.
The company’s focus will remain on producing unique fetish content, Rogers says, adding that, “[Kink] has always been the direction of the company. It’s always been a niche market, but by the speed at which we’re growing, it’s obviously a very popular market. We seem to be attracting more people, and we just think that in the long run, there are still more people who can be entertained by it.”
That will be reflected in some of the company’s future projects include providing information about the BDSM lifestyle, a blog, DVD releases of FuckingMachines content, the company’s first-ever scripted movies, and a new documentary site, BehindKink.com, which goes behind the scenes of a fetish video shoot. Even Kink.com’s homepage will be scaled down to attract the most traffic; surfers who wish to see the more hardcore stuff must now opt to view it.
“If anything, Kink.com will be a soft of softcore façade that will act as a portal to our work,” Rogers explains.
This, the men hope, will assist them in their mission to de-stigmatize fetish content. Says Pirelli, “Even people in mainstream porn—their opinion of fetishists is that we’re all perverts…who do some nasty stuff. For the past several years, we started focusing on demystifying that view. We produce fetish content because we like it, and in full respect for everybody involved.”
“The fact that we’re adding a lot of educational content will make people realize that we’re treating this fetish seriously,” Rogers says. “We’re not just tying people up and abusing them and then publishing pictures of it. This is a real-life fetish we’re talking about here. We’re not just trying to make a quick buck.”
