its non-union. and they dont get residuals or benefits. but thats because insurance companies are anti-sex work. literally,, the underwriters will refuse if you give them an application from say a strip club or adult store. Also since stars have to get tested every 3 days, its legitimately financially irresponsible to insurance them the same way it would be anyone else that gets an STI test 120+ times a year. i dont know how much an STD test cost but it probably costs more than $1. almost all pornstars have to get health insurance through the obamacare website. those early obamacare years were pretty funny too because a lot of the women are infertile for various health reasons and they got pretty mad they were forced to pay for OBGYN and birth control despite never being able to take advantage of either. Stoya had a huge shitfit about it a few years ago, which was ironic because she is a huge lefty feminist bitch, it was the sort of thing that would be posted to one of the L accounts now if they existed then
the only way a pornstar gets money from a scene after its shot is if they do it themselves and put it on a clip site. if you ever go on pornhub almost every pornstar has some clips for sale for $20 and even a membership of some kind so porn addicts can pay every month to view all the output. basically what reddit did to forums, pornhub and onlyfans are doing to solo sites. 20 years ago a whore might post naked pictures of herself on her own website and promote it so people will buy memberships to see the full photo and video sets. but shit like bandwidth and server costs and promoting really made it quite difficult for most women to end up with a profit. a few of the more successful ones were cute quebec ladies like Ariel Rebel and Kate Ground (of KatiesPlayground fame/her tits were the ones posted on cracked.com all the time) one more famous example is Bailey Jay. you could go years without having to touch a man's cock as long as you updated the website when you said you would and it was independent, fail or succeed on your own.
but now with websites like onlyfans and pornhub the upfront costs are literally zero. you dont even need recording equipment, just use your cellphone and laptop cameras. your only problem now is these websites wont payout unless you hit a certain amount. ($50 or $100)
Covid really fucked a lot of the paysites this way, because the restrictions on shooting basically made it impossible to shoot scenes the usual way making it so they essentially only made porn the same way they do on onlyfans already. just the stars and their cameras. this has led to a lot of women essentially entering semi-retirement and putting most of their focus on producing their own content. it really doesnt make sense to get paid $100 once when you know you can convince 100 idiots to pay $20 for the same clip also you dont have to follow those STD testing guidlelines when you're just shooting yourself masturbating or fucking your boyfriend saving you even more money+time. the economics basically are going to force the budgets and pay to change to work at these sites. a few are already giving a small residual based on views, but its only a few percent, while pornstars get a 90% cut of whatever is sold on the clip sites. i know a few sites are basically sharing scenes between companies in lieu of updating and forming megasites, which is basically when you know a website is on its last days. mainstream porn production was already a pretty small market. the porn output among the mainstream sites was only about 5000 scenes a year. thats including all your Milf, VR, IR, lesbo, and incest sites.
you can tell things are starting to go bad on the home front because of how cheaply lifetime memberships were getting for a lot of sites. you could get access to all of bangbros/realitykings/brazzers content forever for about $700. to put that in perspective those sites used to account for roughly 25% of that 5000 i was talking about earlier.
overall anyone that isn't in the content creator realm of porn is probably fucked. mindgeek must be burning plenty of cash because of COVID. i wouldn't be surprised if they just shut down or consolidate sites and basically put all their eggs into becoming a better onlyfans. they literally aren't allowed to be a tube site conglomerate anymore.
TL;DR ironically enough SJWs might do what the religious right didn't. and kill porn.
that would be pretty smart, i'm surprised no one been doing that en masse the last 100 years, it would be a massive endeavor but outside of the healthcare there is no real need to be in SAG anyways for most of these actors. only films with >500k budgets might get harrassed for not being unionized and not even the dogshit you see on scifi has that high of budgets. and its really only worth it for biggest productions with 3M budgets, those are your prestige pics like Moonlight. it'll take more time filing the paperwork and getting it back than it would take to make your film.