At a Miami home rental in late 2014, camera crews took a look through the viewfinder and brought Mia Khalifa to attention.
Pornographic film crews gathered at Airbnb to film a scene starring Khalifa in the hijab. This is the moment that has dominated adult-film sites for years and beheading threats from Islamic State supporters.
This compensated Khalifa for a brief career that spilled over into stardom worldwide – and boosted her life completely when she became the most searched adult-movie star on the planet.
Khalifa on Monday mowed down any illusions in the adult film industry’s wages, claiming that he received “nearly 12,000” for a dozen shootings in the three months before he left the industry in early 2015.
How exactly this is done – bringing in cash for websites, and leaving her uncut – has prompted questions over the mysterious multi-billion dollar porn industry, which is taking advantage of monsters and some women trying to put their past in the forefront of their audience.
On PornHub, one of the leading adult-video sites, she is currently No. 2 in actor searches, with only 784 million views – more than two per person in the United States. But she does not receive any remains from that site or others, Khalifa told The Washington Post.
She left the business quickly after a global glance, and the eyes of the fans on the street forced her to retire. “I’m not worried about ISIS, it’s jarring, but I don’t live in fear,” she said in a phone interview from Copenhagen.
“I live with shame.”
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The adult entertainment industry – an enormous web of YouTube-like streaming sites, live-camera models and increasingly private social media channels – is a dirty financial and bandwidth juggernaut.
Industry analysts spit the statistics. According to Alec Helmie, president and publisher of adult entertainment industry news site XBiz, the number of subscribed video sites, DVDs and streaming licenses is generated every year in the range of 2 billion. Clear live-streaming estimates another 2 billion.
“The safest estimate is to say it’s worth billions, but I’m not sure how many billions, and nobody does,” Dan Miller, managing editor of AVN, another trade publication, told Quartz. Projections on the high-end accounted for all the obscene earnings that exceeds both the NFL and Netflix.
If an actor pursues the film industry, there are two options with different compensation paths. One is the traditional construction studio, which pays actresses as contractors – a flat rate for scenes, so volume is key. Khalifa did the same, and in her case, about $ 1,000 each was very typical, Helmi said, with the bulk of profits from subscriptions and advertising revenue going to production companies.
The other is the standalone model, which offers a larger cut and selection for residuals.
But that money never goes back to the actors. Jason Urgo, chief executive of socialblade, a third-party analytics site for YouTube, says that if Pornhub Khalifa pays a fraction of its advertising revenue per view, similar to YouTube, the videos could earn around 1 501,000 using the amount Pornhub revealed.
Pornhub declined to say how much money Khalifa made from the videos.
As a result, tube sites like Pornhub monetized the Internet’s endless loop by uploading videos and endless streaming of actors, long after some business, such as Khalifa – create a scene where adult-movie scenes can follow actors and possibly live them.
PornHub says it generates revenue from many areas, including advertising on premium accounts and videos, such as YouTube. Corey Price, vice president of PornHub, said models and companies create their own channels and generate revenue there.
Bang Bros. film-making company Khalifa has signed on as a member of the partner network, which has more than 100,000 “independent sex workers” and more than 1,000 content generators. In particular, they and Pornhub Khalifa have benefited greatly from the videos.
Bang Brothers did not return a request for comment. The site has a web page that uses the caliphate name as the URL address, said her spokesman Jeff Solomon. Even if it was written in his first person voice, it would not pay for the rights, Khalifa said.
Videos, and publishers’ content, are constantly filling Pornhub’s servers. If you watch all the videos uploaded in a single day, it will take 115 years to complete – a similar period between Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, and the first Wright Brothers fleet in 2018, the site said last year.
Tu with the name of the caliph
Porn hub declined to say how much money it has made from Mia Khalifa’s videos.
Three of the top 10 actresses on the site are now retired or inactive in business, and an industry veteran, and there is little help in claiming compensation or eliminating their videos if they close their income.
“At the end of the day, whether it’s Kim Kardashian or Mia, they don’t have the authority to tell Pornhub to remove content,” the veteran said, refusing to be named because he is still working in the industry.
Tasha Rein, an adult film actress, has emerged from royalties saying that a woman like Khalifa at the beginning of her career was very surprised. She said that popularity translates into income.
“Unfortunately for us, though, we don’t make much money from hits like songwriter or showrunner,” she says.
But Helmi said he may have fewer sympathizers in the industry. “They are very aware of what they are getting themselves into. These are the harsh facts of pornography,” he said, but that the high visibility of the caliphate against the compensation of a few thousand dollars was “clearly damaging.”
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The criticism and humiliation of Khalifa following the Twitter revelation on her payday suggests that she is innocent or dishonest. “I have never promised ‘millions,’ and I do not expect it. I am clear about my general misconceptions about myself, and the industry,” she later wrote.
Khalifa has struggled with those prejudices ever since she became a household name and has been in the media blitz lately for the purpose of reinventing herself.
Khalifa, born in Beirut, came to Montgomery County, Maryland, in 2001 as a grade-school immigrant to a family fleeing violence in Lebanon. She started school in the United States two weeks before the hijacked plane crashed into the Pentagon on the other side of the Potomac. Her brown skin and a few words of English gave her the nickname “terrorist.”
She said she felt compelled to be ashamed of her Middle Eastern heritage, even if she was not Catholic and Muslim. The local sports teams became a refuge, and at turns, a garment. “You don’t have to know the language,” said the Washington Capitals die-hard fan. “You have to watch the game.”
She improved her English at the Military Boarding Institute in Virginia, and graduated as a history major before moving to Miami from the University of Texas at El Paso. A man stopped her there to ask if she was a model.
She was overweight and isolated as an immigrant, and she ate the certification she received from producers and management who shone at Bang Brothers after undergoing weight loss and breast augmentation surgery.
“I want to have a dirty secret and rebel,” she said. “I was sexy for the first time in my life.” But the worldwide response to her hijab video has led her to quit her business quickly.
Khalifa later worked as a paralegal, but the faces of the men in her office revealed that she already knew them. “I stared, and said, ‘Hey, you’re not.’ Questions, ”she says.
She got another job as a bookkeeper before she turned her hobby into two sports-talk shows, both of which are now defunct. Now, she is working on several projects with app developers.
But her past as an adult movie star is albatross in her neck. She is instantly recognizable everywhere, even in Disneyland where she is hunted for photos.
A few years after her career ended, her continued popularity led many fans to wonder if she was still active in the industry, and collect large paychecks from her highly visible profile. That’s not so, she said.
“It feels like being trapped in icks b,” she said. “There are still millions of people who, for the past five years, thought I could do nothing but porn.”
Further, the appropriate compensation for her work is also beside the point. She seems to have approved of a decision she is now regretting. “The money’s not worth it.”
Some activities in recent years – in the #MeToo era – have promoted the safety, compliance and empowerment of the actress as marketing pitches for consumers, and live-streaming videos are a reliable revenue tool for performers, Helmi said.
It does not matter to the caliph who is newly engaged and looking to live the rest of his life.
She said some women entering the business were vulnerable and took advantage of industry producers, while others were looking for a bigger star turn. “I’m not for women entering the industry. I don’t think it’s an industry that should be respected,” she said.
Backed-up money doesn’t change her. If she can, Khalifa says, the industry will burn to the ground and send all her videos along with it.
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“I just want people to stop looking at me naked,” she said.