What does Mia Khalifa’s Bang Bros contract tell us about her net worth?
Mia Khalifa is refusing to back down from her fight with her former employer Bang Bros. The former porn star has been using 2020 to get honest about her time in the porn industry, and Bang Bros claims Mia Khalifa is lying not only about her net worth, but other aspects of her contract.
In her most recent response to Bang Bro’s allegations, Mia Khalifa pulled her contract with the company out to show the agreement she originally signed for the company with. But by bringing her contract into the picture, we learned more about how the pay structure works in most porn companies.
One of two types of contracts
In an Instagram Story, Mia Khalifa showed off her contract, saying she should have received $59k for videos she produced and starred in at Bang Bros. But she only earned $12k during her time. Khalifa also claims according to this contract that she made about $5,000 between webcaming and being a social media manager.
When fact checking Mia Khalifa’s story, The Washington Post spoke with Alec Helmy, president of XBiz, a porn industry news website, and Jason Urgo, CEO of Social Blade, a third party YouTube analytics site. Both offered a different type of pay contract that Khalifa could’ve signed with Bang Bros.
According to Hemly, it sounds like Mia Khalifa’s net worth is from a flat rate style contract. Studios contract porn actors at a fixed rate per a video, with any additional revenue going into the studio’s pocket. To Hemly, a thousand dollars per a video is an average rate for these types of contracts.
Of course, according to Mia Khalifa, she backed out of her contract after only 12 videos, and therefore only made $12,000.
On the other hand, according to Urgo, Khalifa also could’ve been signed for a contract that pays less up front, but any residual money made from the videos would be paid out to her. Think the YouTube Partner program, where creators get a set rate of the ad revenue made from their videos.
However, according to numbers released by Pornhub, Khalifa’s videos on their site made over $500k. In Urgo’s mind, it’s hard to believe even if she broke off her contract, that Khalifa only made $12,000 from her Bang Bros videos at the peak of her career.
Profiting off of Khalifa’s name
But that’s not the issue at hand. While Mia Khalifa acknowledges this is what her contract was for, her issue is that sites like Bang Bros and Pornhub are still growing their net worth off of her content, and she isn’t seeing a cent of it.
Years after she left the industry, Mia Khalifa still remains a top searched actress on numerous porn sites. Even though she claims she did only 12 videos, Pornhub has over 3,000 videos tied to Khalifa’s name uploaded to the site, though most are just duplicates.
Khalifa isn’t the first actress to complain about leaving the industry and still being tied to it either. Tasha Reign wrote a piece for Mel Magazine explaining how unsurprised she was that Khalifa not only got so little while in the industry, but then also received not even a cent after leaving.
“Unfortunately for us, though, we don’t make as much money from the hits as, say, a songwriter or showrunner,” she states in the piece. Reign goes on to explain that most models are on a per scene contract, and even big names are still seeing only one paycheck, though it’s more than the $1,000 Khalifa was being paid at the beginning of her career.
What’s Khalifa’s endgame?
At the end of the day, Mia Khalifa doesn’t want her net worth to be tied to her days in porn anymore. The majority of the money Khalifa has made at this point has been from her other endeavors outside of the porn industry. Instead, Khalifa is aiming to raise awareness to others who think the porn industry is easy money.
Khalifa was often seen as a porn legend, someone who made millions from her short time in the industry. But the reality is far from it according to Khalifa, as she continues to claim she made $20k max from everything she did with Bang Bros. She doesn’t want her money. Mia Khalifa just wants to be free to the decision she made in her youth to become a porn star.
