Law student makes $1.3 million a year by posting adult content (Exclusive)

When Emily Coscia was an undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon University, her day started like any of her colleagues. She woke up in her dorm, got ready for the day, and headed to her lecture. Like many college students, she went to work part-time after classes, working throughout school to earn the school’s annual list price of $90,000.

Kosia earned her bachelor’s degree in May from a highly selective school in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. But during her four years at CMU, Kosia didn’t take shifts at the library or work at a local coffee shop to pay for her tuition. Her alternative was a much more lucrative one. That means he posted adult content online to millions of followers and made about $1.3 million a year doing it.

Just five years ago, an amount of this magnitude would have been unheard of for Kosia. The author, now 22 years old, was born and raised in Los Angeles. Ever since she could remember, she wanted to be a lawyer.

“The beginning of the story is a little sad,” Kosia tells PEOPLE in an interview about her start creating content.

When she was 15, her father died suddenly, leaving her family in what she calls “very severe financial instability.” As a result, Kosia said, she knew that if she was serious about pursuing her dream of pursuing a career as a lawyer, she would have to finance it herself, and that her job at McDonald’s would not allow her to do so.

At the time, social media platform TikTok was still in its infancy, but Kosia saw it as an opportunity to grow what was to come: a huge audience of followers. This could later become a source of income for her when she leaves LA to pursue a secondary degree at the age of 18.

While still in high school, she opened four separate TikTok accounts, each containing a slightly different version of herself, “to test the TikTok algorithm so I could best understand what personality types would be most appealing to the audience I was trying to reach,” she tells PEOPLE.

That audience?

“It’s the male demographic, between the ages of 18 and 24, especially those working in the technology industry,” Kosia said. “They tend to have liquidity, which means money available for me.”

By the time she turned 18 in March of her senior year of high school, she had honed her now-million-earning high school girl persona, dubbed it “Hot Blockchain,” and was finally able to start monetizing her platform. The following year, she made about $250,000 and has been paid checks in the millions every year since then.

But that money did not come without a very diligent schedule. When her college lectures ended around 2 p.m., she returned to her dorm room and turned on her Twitch livestream. To keep up with classes, Kosia incorporates studying into her streams, essentially re-presenting the lecture she just took to her followers. These are all part of the persona she was cultivating online.

“I realized I’d never be the prettiest girl in the world,” she says plainly about the niche she’s carved out for herself online. “But what I get to be is a girl who sells exclusive content and goes to school. That character was enhanced by the fact that I’m on Twitch and giving lectures. And I have big breasts.”

“It was a good mutual agreement between me and the viewers,” she continues. “They knew I was studying honestly and they liked seeing me studying honestly.”

Kosia doesn’t have many boundaries – at the beginning of the interview, she dares to say there’s “nothing I’m comfortable answering” – but her social media presence has a big one. That means she has never posted any nude content.

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Instead, she describes photos and videos of herself sometimes wearing skimpy swimsuits and lingerie as “sneaky.” In fact, she says much of what she sells is the relationship she has with her followers.

“Most of the time, especially if you’re not doing porn, people subscribe to you because they like you and want to talk to you,” she says. In addition to her streams, which often lasted about five hours a day, Kosia would spend an additional two hours personally replying to followers who had paid to receive her messages.

Kosia says: “I think number one sells relationships and number two sells pictures of you looking sexy in a bikini.”

When she enrolled at CMU, she had 27,000 followers on Instagram, which now stands at 1.2 million, and even though her follower count was rapidly increasing, she still maintained regular activities as a full-time student.

“It was really, really, really hard,” she said of Balancing, noting that she briefly took a break from streaming during her sophomore year because she was taking a course on the infamous matrix.

During the first few months of college, Kosia was still building her following into the behemoth it is today, but she also had to deal with the occasional comments from her classmates.

“I might be a bit of a clown,” she admits. But soon those snide remarks gave way to genuine curiosity from her colleagues, many of whom were in the science and technology fields, about whether they could use her follower base for school projects.

“I think all of my research groups have great sample sizes,” she laughs. “My colleagues started to see that this was a job to make money, and they inherently respected that.”

As the end of college approached, Kosia turned his attention to law school, as he had long planned. She scored an amazing 172 on the LSAT, putting her in the 99th percentile of test takers. But the real “labor of love” was the written part of the application process, she says.

“There were a lot of different versions of the essay that veered away from talking about social media,” she says. “Then my best friend Jordan said, ‘This isn’t you. Your passion is determined in large part by the kind of person you are.'” – Someone who posted adult content online.

In her application to her dream school – the University of Michigan, which she said was attracted to its public defender system – Coscia reflected on the immense privilege her seven-figure salary afforded her and how even with the cash she still had a desire to be in court on behalf of the most vulnerable.

“Why would I want to go to a mansion party in Malibu when I can use the skills I have to come here and help people in need?” she asked, referring to the lavish lifestyles of influencers.

She vividly remembers the exact moment she opened her acceptance letter to the University of Michigan. Kosia was actually on the phone with another female student at the university who posted adult content, and she said she was worried that her R-rated online presence would make it harder for her to get a job after school.

“It was poetic,” Kosia says. “When I got the email that I had been accepted to the University of Michigan and had been awarded a huge scholarship to do so, I just burst into tears. I texted my best friend Jordan, who was also my best friend, ‘I’m going to become a lawyer.’ And she said, “You were always going to be this way.” ”

As Kosia tells People about her long journey to law school, sitting in her bedroom at the Bar Club Housing on the University of Michigan’s campus, the same room where she can be seen dancing to trendy sounds on her TikTok account, all she has to say about her first semester is glorious.

Although the classes are “rigorous” and the workload “tiring,” she says, “I’m surrounded by talented, kind, and caring people.” “This is the greatest privilege in the world.”

As in her first few months at CMU, Kosia admits that her unconventional side job makes her a bit of an “enigma” on campus, and she occasionally faces questions about how she thinks she can “work in big law.” (“I’m like, ‘Sister, that’s not the goal,’” she said with a laugh, referring to her plans to become a public defender.)

“But everyone here is really respectful and wonderful,” she says. “And I have some people come up to me all day and say, ‘I have a great idea for a TikTok trend.’ Honestly, it’s the cutest thing ever.”

Although it may seem like a long way off, Kosia has big plans for life after law school. She hopes to start as a public defender, perhaps for “a few years,” she says, before transitioning to an assistant professorship fellowship and returning to academia.

“I love teaching,” says Kosia (after all, she earned thousands by retaking undergraduate courses).

But on the other hand, Kosia added, she would also like to take on pro bono work supporting other girls in the adult entertainment field. The friends she made as a Playboy Bunny need a lawyer to protect them in a notoriously predatory industry and to get nude photos taken down after they were leaked online.

“I would love to help them,” she says. “It’s as simple as a cease and desist letter to some people who won’t leave them alone. I have no problem putting my name on it.”

At the end of the interview, when asked if there was anything she wanted to add before leaving the Zoom call, Kosia returned to a topic she’d been thinking about since she jumped on the phone. The idea was that in this day and age, participating in the adult content industry doesn’t have to come at the expense of other types of accomplishments.

“This does not preclude academic or professional success,” she flatly tells PEOPLE. “If you want it enough, if you’re smart enough, it comes across in the interview, and it definitely shows up in your test scores. I know a lot of girls who say, ‘Well, I did this for the money, and now I don’t feel like I can even go back to school.'” And I think you can always do it. ”

At least that seems to be the case with Kosia.