Top-viewed porn actress shut out of revenue
In a Miami home rental in late 2014, a camera crewman peered through a viewfinder and brought Mia Khalifa into focus.
The pornography film crew gathered at the Airbnb to shoot the scene featuring Khalifa in a hijab. It was a moment that would dominate adult-film sites for years and prompt beheading threats from Islamic State supporters.
It also left Khalifa modestly compensated for a brief career that catapulted her into worldwide stardom - and completely upended her life when she became the most-searched adult-film star on the planet.
Khalifa shattered any illusions regarding adult film industry pay on Monday, saying on Twitter she received about $12,000 for about a dozen shoots over three months before she left the industry in early 2015, and never a “penny again.”
How that exactly happens - a still top-ranked presence bringing in cash for websites, yet leaving her without a cut - prompted questions over the secretive multibillion-dollar porn industry that reaps monster profits and keeps some women trying to outrun their past at the forefront of their audience.
On Pornhub, one of the leading adult-video sites, she is currently ranked No. 2 among actor searches, with an eye-popping 784 million views alone - more than two for every person in the United States. But she does not get any residuals from that site or any others, Khalifa told the Washington Post.
She quickly left the business after the world's gaze, and the eyes of fans on the street, bewildered her into retirement. “I was not scared of ISIS. It was jarring. But I wasn't living in fear,” she said in a phone interview from Copenhagen.
“It was more that I was living in shame.”
The adult entertainment industry - an enormous web of YouTube-like streaming sites, live-camera models and an increasing amount of private social media channels - is a murky financial and bandwidth juggernaut.
Industry analysts spitball the figures. Something in the range of $2 billion is generated globally every year from subscription video sites, DVDs and broadcast licensing, though the exact numbers are notoriously difficult to track, said Alec Helmy, the president and publisher of XBiz, an adult entertainment industry news site. Explicit live-streaming brings in another estimated $2 billion, he said.
“The safe estimate is to say it's worth billions, but I don't know exactly how many billion, and no one does,” Dan Miller, managing editor of AVN, another trade publication, told Quartz. Estimates on the higher end count all porn revenue eclipsing both the NFL and Netflix.
If an actor pursues the film industry, there are two options with wildly different compensation paths. One is the traditional production studio that pays actresses as contractors - a flat rate for scenes, so volume is key. That is what Khalifa did, and in her case, about $1,000 each is pretty typical, Helmy said, with the lion's share of profits from subscriptions and ad revenue going to production companies.
Another is an independent model that provides a bigger cut and options for residuals.
But that money does not always go back to actors. If Pornhub paid Khalifa a portion of advertising revenue per view similar to YouTube, the videos could have generated about $501,000 using an amount disclosed by Pornhub, said Jason Urgo, the chief executive of SocialBlade, a third-party analytics site for YouTube.
Pornhub declined to say how much money it has made from Khalifa's videos.
Endless stream
In effect, tube sites such as Pornhub have monetized the infinite loop of the internet by uploading an endless stream of videos of actors long after some of them, like Khalifa, have left the business - creating a scenario where adult-film scenes will follow the actors and perhaps outlive them.
Pornhub said it generates revenue from several areas, including premium accounts and YouTube-like advertising on videos. Models and companies create their own channels and draw revenue there, said Corey Price, a vice president at Pornhub.
Bang Bros, the film-production company Khalifa signed with, is a member of the partner network that spans more than 100,000 “independent sex workers” and more than a 1,000 content generators, he said. Essentially, they and Pornhub received the most profit from Khalifa's videos.
Bang Bros did not return a request for comment. The site owns a web page that uses Khalifa's name as a URL address, her spokesman Jeff Solomon said. But it does not pay her for rights, even though it is written in her first-person voice, Khalifa said.
Videos, and content from a dizzying amount of publishers, are constantly filling Pornhub's servers. If you were to watch all the video uploaded in a single day, it would take 115 years to finish - about the same span between the first Wright Brothers flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, and 2018, the site said last year.