For years, Mia Khalifa was one of the most searched names on Pornhub. She says the whole thing paid her about $12,000. She started in October 2014. She was 21. About a dozen scenes over three months, at the standard flat rate of around $1,000 a scene. Then one scene went viral. Death threats followed. Her family disowned her. She quit in early 2015. The videos didn't quit. By 2019, Pornhub ranked her No. 2, with 784 million views. More than 3,800 videos carried her name. She had filmed about a dozen. She got no residuals. Not from the studio, not from the free sites. There was even a website under her own name, written in her voice. It belonged to the studio's parent company. It paid her nothing. Do the math. One analytics firm estimated that as a Pornhub partner, the views alone could have paid her over $500,000. She got $12,000 for the work and nothing for the fame. The studio tells it differently. Bang Bros says she earned over $178,000 from it and its affiliates, and worked in the industry for more than two years. In the video below, she sits down with BBC HARDtalk in 2019 and talks about what that work cost her. Keep this part. A flat fee pays for your work once. If someone else owns the file, every view after that is their money, not yours. A young woman trapped by a bad deal, or an adult who signed a standard contract and regrets it?