Crypto 4 Pornstars
How Cryptocurrencies could have helped Mia Khalifa (safe for work)
Mia Khalifa’s story started after she posted several pornographic images of her and her husband on the website Reddit. Shortly after she starred in a handful scenes for the producer BangBros. She claims she was paid $12,000 for her time and never shot porn again.
Courtesy of her natural talents (and handful of hijab scenes that set the Middle East on fire) Mia later became one of the most famous and searched for Pornstars in world.
Any publicity is good publicity.
With an onslaught of death threats and Fatwas, her viewings exploded. She became so popular that BangBros apparently kept releasing old material marketing it to make it look like she was filming new content. Unfortunately, due to the death threats and a souring relationship with BangBros, Khalifa quit the industry.
Getting Paid for an Honest Days Work
Traditionally actors got paid per shoot/day. Unsurprisingly, women get paid more than men in this industry. Earnings can vary based on your popularity and the type of scene being shot. It’s piece rate work but the pay has stagnated in recent years as there are so few taboos’ left. Back in the day going into porn was considered to be a toxic career choice socially. Nowadays no one cares. Since it’s now socially acceptable there is no market requirement to incentivise actors to participate by offering more money. Pay has dried up under the traditional producer led business model.
OnlyFans Changed The Game
Once upon a time a happy go lucky company sought to change the world. The company looked at the internet and thought:
All these artists are uploading their content onto these massive platforms like YouTube and hoping the ads generate enough money for them to live off. That isn’t cool. What if we created a subscription platform where people paid a monthly fee to gain content and interactions with their favourite artists! Wouldn’t that be fairer and more empowering!
Subscription porn was born! At the wealth gap we grew up with DVD’s from shady shops, followed by website subscriptions (circumvented on Limewire) and finally the utopic wonder that was free porn on sites like PornHub.
The sex workers on OnlyFans still found their market. Turns out there are lots of wealthy, socially awkward men who not only want to spank the monkey but also want an online girlfriend experience. These men spend thousands on their favourite models.
All was going well until OnlyFans suddenly decided it was going PG. Sex workers were furious that their source of income was about to be stripped from them. OnlyFans eventually backed down (a huge chunk of their revenue is from sex workers) but the trust had been permanently damaged.
Where Can Crypto Help?
OnlyFans & PornHub are centralised entities with decisions being made at the top and those business decisions filtering down across the various platforms. Cryptocurrency brings 2 special features that we believe will be invaluable to content creators, Non Fungible Tokens (NFT’s) & Fractional Payments
Non Fungible Tokens (NFT’s)
NFT’s represent ownership of digital content. The space is crazy right now with people paying hundreds of millions for pixelated art on decentralised platforms like Open Sea.
The art is just the start. Yes the space is crazy but even if the prices are mental the technology is serious business for content creators. Content creators can mint their own NFTs for music, video, artwork and probably certificates of ownership for real world assets at some point in the future
CumRocket is an NFT marketplace for adult content. Here is their mission statement:
CumRocket plans to disrupt the monopolistic, predatory adult industry by empowering content creators (and their fanbases) as stakeholders in an adult-friendly ecosystem. We plan to provide many of the services and features creators might find on OnlyFans, clipsites, or camshows, alongside other future usecases and benefits provided by the power of blockchain. Championed by a passionate team, CumRocket is intent on prioritizing their relationship with content creators—a relationship that's often non-existent between creators and the platforms they're beholden to.
CumRocket has its own cryptocurrency (CUMMIES) and purchases are made using CUMMIES on the platform. Using crypto means CumRocket has no relationship with traditional fiat systems and their payment processors (Visa, Mastercard, AMEX) so they don’t have to worry about restrictions, minimum payments, porn appearing on your credit card etc.
Fractional Payments
Imagine a world where every video view, every song listened to triggers a micro payment. As consumers that will take some getting use to but it will be fantastic for content creators.
The billions of views Khalifa has received would all have generated a micropayment which would go to her. No need for 3rd party platforms to collect and pay monthly. It would all be done automatically using crypto.
Fractional payments per view on decentralised platforms that cannot be censored with digital merchandise with proof of ownership. That world is coming. Until Khalifa starts producing NFT’s we will have to stick with her OnlyFans here.
There is a way to do this already using the Bitcoin Lightning Network. We will provide details in a future publication. Please subscribe to find out when it drops
Until Next Time
The Wealth Gap