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Ask who was at the top of this industry in 2019 and you are really asking which of three unrelated instruments you want to read, because they were measuring different things and none of them was measuring popularity in the way the question implies.
That is not a dodge. All three published their results, all three are still checkable, and the disagreement between them is the interesting part.
The awards, and what they were counting
The industry's two trade awards are the closest thing to a documented answer, because they run a process and publish the outcome.
At the 36th AVN Awards, Angela White took Female Performer of the Year — the middle of three consecutive wins in that category across 2018, 2019 and 2020, which no one had done before. The category is defined against the previous year's body of work, which is the first thing that trips people building a "best of 2019" list: an award handed out in January 2019 is a verdict on 2018.
XBIZ runs a different mechanism, and it is worth knowing what it is before treating the result as a popularity measure. Nominations are submitted by clients; the winners are voted on by XBIZ staff, industry colleagues and participating organisations. That is a trade body polling itself, which makes it a good record of professional standing among people who hire and work with performers, and a poor proxy for what audiences were watching.
Both are real records. Neither is a scoreboard.
The platform data, and what it was counting
The other 2019 answer came from Pornhub's annual Year in Review, which published its most-searched performers: Lana Rhoades first, then Mia Khalifa, Riley Reid, Abella Danger and Brandi Love. On the male side the report put Jordi El Niño Polla at the top, followed by Alex Adams, Owen Gray, Johnny Sins and James Deen.
Those are genuinely published figures, and they are the ones every list of that era quietly reused. What they measure is narrower than it looks. It is search volume on one platform — not viewing, not paid support, not output. A performer whose name people type is a performer people are looking for and cannot find, which correlates with fame but also with not being on that site.
Two of the names on that list had barely worked in mainstream production for years by then. They were being searched anyway. Search rank is a memory of fame as much as a measure of it.
It is also a marketing document. The report exists because an annual data release generates press, and the platform chooses what to publish and how to frame it. That does not make the numbers false; it does mean nobody audited them.
What all three missed
By 2019 the ground was already moving under every one of these instruments. Direct-to-fan platforms were becoming a serious share of performer income, and the whole point of that model is that the numbers are private. A performer earning more from subscribers than from studio shoots would show up nowhere in an awards cycle keyed to studio releases, and only weakly in tube search.
So the honest summary of 2019 is that the year's most commercially successful performers were, for the first time, partly invisible to the mechanisms that ranked them. That gap has only widened.
What the previous version of this page ranked by
The old article's ten entries were sorted by the writer's preferences and padded with the performers' private lives — where they grew up, their families' religion, why they entered the industry, what money trouble they were in, their measurements, their sexual histories, and in one case a criminal charge from when the subject was nineteen.
None of that is professional information, none of it was sourced, and all of it concerns identifiable people who are still alive and still working. It has been dropped rather than rewritten, and it is the reason the page no longer carries per-performer entries.
Reading a 2019 list in 2026
Treat any of them as a snapshot of one instrument at one moment. The awards tell you what the trade thought of the previous year's work. The platform report tells you what one search box saw. Neither told you who was building the career that mattered most, and by 2019 neither could.