The strange surveilled life of Piper Rockelle: why did a former child influencer decide to go on OnlyFans?

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She made millions as a tween and teenager by posting clips of herself and her friends on YouTube. Then the business collapsed amid acrimony. What does her success in the adult industry, at 18, say about surveillance, social media and sexualisation?

‘Honestly, the answer is kind of gross,” says Piper Rockelle, in a recent TikTok video, reflecting on why she is so popular on OnlyFans. In the clip, she fidgets her fingers and swings in her swivel chair. “It’s because I look so young. I mean, I am really young. I’m literally like fresh turned 18 … and people kind of like that, unfortunately.”

This is an accurate and honest assessment. At the end of last year, not long after turning 18, the former child star and teen influencer began an online countdown, telling her millions of followers on TikTok and Instagram that she would be launching herself on OnlyFans on 1 January. Every day or so since, she has posted pictures of herself on the platform, sometimes posing in a typical teenager’s bedroom – a pink cuddly stuffed pig on the bed behind her, fairy lights on the wall – wearing teddy-bear-themed pants and bras, or fluffy underwear decorated with bunny-rabbit faces and floppy ears.

She claims she earned $2.9m (£2.2m) within her first 24 hours on the site. “The money is like: what?! It’s like: wow! I’ve never seen this amount of money my entire life,” she says when we meet at 8.30am on a Monday in the Airbnb she has rented for a working weekend in the Hollywood Hills. Anyone who has watched the property show Selling Sunset, based in Los Angeles, will recognise the aesthetic – incredible views and large, lavish rooms that somehow feel cold.

“The amount of money I get every single day is so incredible and so unreal that I just want to try to make sure I don’t become numb to it,” she says. “It feels like it’s a game.”

“Yeah,” says her aunt Destiny, who is drinking black coffee by the kitchen island while supervising her niece. “It’s pretty as-tro-no-mical.”

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It is difficult to know how literally to take the figures. Rockelle’s business manager later tells me they are accurate and predicts her income will exceed $40m in her first year on OnlyFans. But a lot of the site’s stars boast about their earnings and the figures are impossible to verify. The narrative of big money seems to be part of the platform’s business model, luring more people – mostly women – into signing up as creators. OnlyFans will not comment on earnings, but its chief executive, Keily Blair, told a Bloomberg conference last year that it had paid $25bn to creators since it was founded in 2016. It is understood that top performers can make tens of millions of dollars a year.

Rockelle stayed up late last night filming and she has not yet had breakfast when we meet, but she is still super friendly and full of energy. She checks her account on the app and tells me she is in the top 0.012% of the platform’s earners.

Before meeting her, I felt more anxious than I usually would about an interview, uncertain about how to write about Rockelle without inadvertently casting shame on her; promoting the amount of money that can be made on OnlyFans; or advertising her accounts to more men who might be interested in pictures of her in bunny underwear. It was difficult to work out how the last problem could be avoided, but when I noticed her TikTok content had been liked 1.4bn times, I supposed the cat was already out of the bag.

She sits down in a lacy pink minidress, the kind of outfit a teenager or preteen might wear to a ballet class, chatting in her sunny, bubbly voice about the lovely weather in LA, recommending burger restaurants, showing off her nails (which are decorated with tiny ladybirds) and her tattoos (dollar signs and a reminder to “be grateful”) and telling me about her many, many pets. Rockelle is as determinedly amiable as you would expect of someone who has been monetising her likability online for a decade. I come away genuinely liking her, while also aware that I’ve been blasted with a jet stream of girl-next-door charm for four hours.

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She doesn’t want to have pictures taken at her real home, elsewhere in the city, because she has four dogs and about 100 rescue cats and this morning the house is being cleaned. But she does want to tell me about Luna, the horse she has just adopted.

“She always performs really well,” she says, showing me TikToks of her lip-syncing next to Luna, an elderly, noble-looking piebald with mournful brown eyes. A chunk of her OnlyFans money has been spent on renting space in stables at the edge of the city. “This one’s got almost a million likes,” she says, swiping through pictures of her wearing denim micro‑shorts, sticking out her tongue and grooming the horse’s mane. Clips of her with kittens also do well.

Soon after we start talking, Rockelle jumps up to say goodbye to a 17-year-old girl from New York who is clunking a suitcase down the wooden stairs. They have spent the weekend together here, making videos in the infinity pool and the bedrooms, posting pictures of themselves on Instagram kissing red lipstick over each other’s cheeks, pretending to be in a relationship for clicks and likes.

The two hug at the door, then Rockelle kicks over her friend’s suitcase, which seems a bit odd, especially when they immediately hug again. Rockelle’s arm is outstretched and she is filming it all on her phone. Later, she uploads the nine-second video to TikTok, presenting the moment as a lovers’ tiff; it quickly reaches 3.7m views. She estimates that this casual bit of content creation, unplanned and over in less than a minute (with me, just off-camera, looking puzzled), will have earned them both several thousand dollars. This money comes care of the company that promotes the music used to soundtrack the clip.

It is not surprising that Rockelle is so efficient about earning. She has been performing for money since she was about three, when she started winning beauty pageants. When she turned eight, her mother began uploading cheerful clips to YouTube of her dancing and making slime (a huge online phenomenon at the time). The material proved very popular – and very lucrative. Her mother moved her from Georgia to LA when she was 10, homeschooling her and recruiting “the Squad”, a group of other preteen children. Initially, they were filmed doing pranks and eating industrial quantities of sweets, before progressing to “crush content” – semi-scripted lifestyle drama with episodes centred on unrequited infatuation, teenage jealousy, first kisses and heartbreak.

“I always think about my life as like a show – you’ve got to keep it interesting,” says Rockelle. “It’s just ridiculous that I can have a lifestyle from doing what I’m doing and people want to watch me.” Her tween and teen content was massive on YouTube, allowing her to build up a fanbase of millions on TikTok and Instagram, becoming the biggest kidfluencer of the 2010s – before everything collapsed. In 2022, 11 of the Squad brought a lawsuit against Rockelle’s mother, Tiffany Smith, and Smith’s then boyfriend and colleague, Hunter Hill, alleging abuse and exploitation. YouTube demonetised her channel, causing her to lose a monthly income of hundreds of thousands of dollars overnight.

The legal proceedings ended in October 2024 when the parties agreed a $1.85m out-of-court settlement. Smith and Hill denied the allegations and did not admit any liability. Rockelle lost her friends, a chunk of money and her source of income – and decided to start an OnlyFans account when she turned 18. Last year, Netflix released Bad Influence: The Dark Side of Kidfluencing, a three-part documentary covering this period of her life. It was made without Rockelle’s involvement, but drew from the thousands of YouTube clips charting her transformation from a child with a helium voice into a sultry teenage star.

Rockelle says she has had low moments. Around 2023, she says, “I lost my grandpa, the lawsuit happened, I had no friends. I didn’t know who I was. It was one of those hard times for me, for sure. You could see it in my eyes. I had a really hard time with eating.” Now, though, she says she is living her dream life. None of the adults in her family, she says, have pushed her into this work. “They say you don’t work a day in your life if you enjoy doing what you’re doing. And I feel like my work is so easy and simple and stupid.”

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Her transition to adult content appears to have made her one of the biggest OnlyFans earners worldwide – this on a platform that has become so profitable that, before his death in March, its Ukrainian-American owner, Leonid Radvinsky, had paid himself dividends of $1.8bn, mostly generated by the work of women around the world stripping off their clothes.

Beneath her breeziness, Rockelle has a nagging sense that she needs to capitalise on her youth. She doesn’t like to sleep in, which is why our meeting is scheduled so early. Ambition, she says, “eats me away inside”. To draw followers to the euphemistically termed “spicy” paid subscription material on OnlyFans, she has to upload free content regularly on TikTok and Instagram; while she may shrug it off as “simple and stupid” work, it is also time-consuming and not straightforward to get right.

“I wake up some days with the biggest stress because I just need to make sure that I’m doing well for myself,” she says. She feels a responsibility to take care of her family; she says she recently paid off debts on her grandmother’s house, bought her a car and has given her enough money that she no longer has to work as a dog-groomer, which was the family business.

“There’s a prime in someone’s life – 18 through 25 or 30 – and this is a prime year for me. Unfortunately, if you’re an older person, you’re more likely to look at a 21-year-old than a 45-year-old,” she says. “I’m scared of getting old. Seriously, I really am. That’s why I don’t care about showing myself off, because I love my body right now and this is not going to be my body for the rest of my life: my ears are going to continue to grow, my nose is going to continue to grow. Nobody’s gonna want to see me when I’m fucking 40.”

In the early days of OnlyFans, the site’s PR team liked to promote the comedy sketches or gardening content that people could upload. Some creators began speaking about the money that could be made from sexualised but relatively tame material; in 2024, Lily Allen said she made more money selling pictures of her feet to fetishists than she earned from Spotify streams. By then, though, the site had become known for explicit adult content. While the company describes itself as “content agnostic”, staff increasingly acknowledge that explicit material drives its profits.

OnlyFans became part of mainstream culture during the pandemic, but it has exploded in the past year. There have been Only-Fans-inspired storylines on television shows including Industry, Euphoria and Margo’s Got Money Troubles. The extreme and highly publicised sex stunts undertaken by Bonnie Blue and Lily Phillips – who competed to have sex with hundreds of men within 24 hours – were not hosted on the site, but both performers became famous because of their followings on the platform. This month, a newly elected Reform UK councillor was forced to step down after voters discovered he had earned money posting pornographic videos on OnlyFans.

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As that last example shows, the question of where society should stand on adult content remains unresolved. Should those who make it be celebrated as liberated, empowered and sex positive? Should we worry that OnlyFans and platforms like it are encouraging people – mainly women – to upload nude images and sell them to men for masturbation? Is the fact that OnlyFans has 4.63 million registered creators and 377.5 million registered users a positive and progressive sign, or a bleak signal about cost-of-living pressures pushing women towards stripping?

While the site doesn’t reveal earnings figures, it is understood that most women uploading nudes are making very modest sums. Because of the site’s paywall, it is difficult for academics and researchers to get an overview of the type of content being consumed.

But people who have worked as recruiters for OnlyFans management firms – businesses that are independent of the site itself – can provide some insight. They describe seeking out teenagers who post bikini shots of themselves on sites such as Instagram and encouraging them to set up an OnlyFans account. The agency then takes a cut of their earnings.

“You’d be looking for girls who are posting provocative content that look young,” one recruiter told me. “They have to be 18, but the younger they look, the more money they make.” Several other teenage influencers have, like Rockelle, launched online countdowns to their 18th birthday, when they will start posting OnlyFans content.

The regulation of pornography has become a preoccupation in UK politics, adjacent to concerns over children’s use of smartphones. The UK government last year introduced age-verification measures for people trying to access online pornography; on the day I meet Rockelle in LA, peers in the House of Lords in London are discussing how to legislate against “barely legal” content – sexually explicit material featuring performers who are 18 or older but who emphasise a childlike aesthetic. The bill was subsequently passed and will be implemented this year, criminalising the publication and possession of pornography where an adult role-plays as a child.

Rockelle is aware that many of her so-called fans, who pay to look at pictures of her in her underwear, are much older men. “Of course,” she says. “But it’s not my fault that I have a kid-like appearance.” This week, in an online conversation with another OnlyFans creator, she said: “Looking like a kid is my thing.” Online, she plays up the theme of having older fans, filming interviews with an odd-looking man in his 50s with a gingery handlebar moustache, describing him as her biggest spender. I suspect this may be scripted content, designed as “rage bait” – deliberately courting disapproval to generate more views.

Before I meet her, I pay $10 to subscribe to her OnlyFans channel for a month. For the moment, Rockelle says she is not posting nude content, although she doesn’t rule it out in future; the basic subscription unlocks mostly bikini and lingerie shots. In some photos, she looks much older than 18. In others – particularly when she puts on glasses or the underwear decorated with bunny ears – she looks younger. It appears to be quite tame. I am not sure if this content would meet the threshold for “barely legal” material under the new UK legislation.

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So, is it harmful? Vicky Young, the head of the Stop It Now helpline at the child-protection charity the Lucy Faithfull Foundation, says she is not familiar with Rockelle’s content, but is clear about the harm that can be caused by “barely legal” material. “Any content that sexualises children and childhood can normalise sexual interactions with under-18s,” she says. “This is dangerous, even if the actors are over 18. It blurs boundaries. Many who have crossed a criminal threshold into viewing sexual images of children didn’t start there. They tell us that they became desensitised over time.”

Guidance from the British Board of Film Classification states that “material (including dialogue) likely to encourage an interest in sexually abusive activity, which may include adults role-playing as non-adults” is unacceptable.

Lady Bertin, who chaired an independent taskforce in the UK on online pornography and who has been pushing for stricter regulation of the industry, says closer attention needs to be paid to websites that are “helping along the pornification of society, making it much more acceptable for women to go into sex work”. She is concerned by “barely legal” content, which she says contributes to society “creeping towards a kind of normalisation of having sex with the minors … It’s just something we cannot ignore.”

Meanwhile, activists in the US have launched the #EndTeenPorn campaign, which calls for a ban on the category of teen pornography and for the minimum age for performers to be raised from 18 to 21, to curb the potential exploitation of 18- to 20-year-olds.

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An OnlyFans spokesperson says moderators check to make sure role-playing of illegal underage activity does not take place. “OnlyFans has robust policies in place to ensure that all users are over the age of 18. We moderate all content to ensure it adheres to our terms of service and acceptable use policy.”

When I ask Rockelle about this, she is defensive. “I didn’t buy my teddy bear and bunny thing [underwear] with the intention of it looking childish. They were just cute. But I can’t think for other people. I’m not doing anything intentionally, but the content I post is the content I post – they can do what they want with it. This is the industry that we’re in,” she says, suddenly sounding weary and cynical.

Destiny interjects drily: “I’m super grateful for the opportunity that Piper has. I’m not going to judge people on what their kinks are – they’re into what they’re into. But, I mean, guys are gross, unfortunately. They have a different mind than us.”

Despite Rockelle’s statements that she is not interested in making pornography and does not do nude material, after subscribing I am bombarded with messages on OnlyFans, purportedly from Rockelle, that promise I can unlock pixellated images of her with “bra off, panties off, fully bare, full length steamy shower vid” if I pay another $34.69.

There is a clear disparity between what Rockelle says and what is being advertised on her behalf. I try, repeatedly, to clarify with Rockelle’s team why explicit material is being offered on her page when she says she does not create nude content, but I do not get an answer, so I end up paying $10 for a “full nudes drop”. This reveals pictures of her still wearing her underwear. It is followed by a $40 offer for nude content, which is also not entirely naked, but includes video and is followed by another message requesting $199.94 for “a fully nakey [sic]” collection. The messages keep coming; the website is quick at processing payments and the money disappears from my bank account with a single click.

A teasing bait and switch, whereby creators promise more explicit content than they deliver, is a well-known feature of the industry. The OnlyFans business model rests on content creators charging monthly subscriptions to fans, but most make the bulk of their money by selling extra content to subscribers, or from shaking “tips” out of fans with whom they chat – or pretend to chat. This is often done by AI or by outsourcing to “chatters” in lower-wage countries such as the Philippines. OnlyFans takes a 20% cut of all earnings.

Rockelle does not want to talk about chatters or whether she employs them; it is the only moment when her friendliness runs dry. There is an industry-wide omertà about the fact that the stars are usually not the ones sending friendly messages to fans.

As our conversation continues, I become confused about whether Rockelle thinks the move to OnlyFans is reputation-damaging, career-enhancing or both. She talks a lot about the problems it causes for creators when they start making adult material and she says she makes TikToks telling younger fans not to follow her on to OnlyFans, “deinfluencing” them from becoming a bop (a woman who posts erotic content for money) or a “mattress actress” (an adult content creator). She points out that she is making a lot of money on OnlyFans only because she already had a huge brand – other 18-year-olds won’t generate her level of income, she says: “It’s not normal.”

She talks a lot, too, about the stigma involved in what she does. “People are not going to want to necessarily be your friend,” she says. “Or they’re going to be ashamed to be around you, even if you’re the best person in the entire world. The stigma around it is terrible. You’re going to be ready to lose people in your life and be ready to be kind of lonely. I’m OK with being lonely, so I’m good. I’m happily lonely.”

She talks a lot about God, but claims she doesn’t go to church much because “I probably wouldn’t be allowed to go to church. I feel like if someone was to say: ‘That’s an OnlyFans model,’ they probably wouldn’t want me there.” She says she has been turned away from volunteering at a vet’s surgery because of her OnlyFans work and that her bank closed her account when it learned the source of her earnings.

This deinfluencing runs alongside her breathlessly telling her fans how much she has earned on the site. It can seem as if talking about the transgressive nature of the work and the shame of it is part of the performance. She occasionally films herself crying, for instance, at the mean comments people have made online about her decision to join OnlyFans; I wonder (equally meanly, perhaps) if her tears are as genuine as the childish freckles she sometimes paints on her nose.

She is thoughtful about the unfairness of women being disgraced for producing content that men are eager to buy. “Boys pretend like they don’t watch stuff like that. But, like, come on. The girls get a lot of shame for doing it – but we’re doing it because of these men. So who is a bad person at the end of the day?”

The group most judgmental about her move to OnlyFans is older women, she says, looking hard in my direction – I am 54. “They say that I’m going to regret my decision and that they wish that they could talk some sense into me,” she says. She notes that the women who express their disapproval online are themselves searching for likes and clicks. “A lot of TikToks did really well because they would talk about me or the topic of me.” She ignores them. “They’re like: you sold your potential. It goes in one ear and out the other.”

Rockelle talks like the teenager she is: sentences get interrupted by a glance at her phone or the reapplication of lip gloss. But she is sharp about the business of social media, a world she has inhabited more intensely than most. When I look at the clips she has filmed with the 17-year-old from New York, they seem bewilderingly boring. A typical sample of dialogue from the New Yorker runs: “I’m eating my yoghurt right now. I’m just going to put on my makeup now. I am going to be in the pool. I was literally on the plane for probably over eight hours.”

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Clearly, though, I am not the target audience. “I flew her out so that we could make content,” says Rockelle. “It’s performing really well because you have to give the fans what they want to see.” She has a deeply refined sense of what will generate likes and income: things that are funny, shocking, emotional; plenty of updates on a revolving cast of boyfriends and girlfriends; night-time shots of her dancing with her female friends in their bikinis.

I meet the 17-year-old’s mother briefly as she packs up her daughter’s belongings before their flight back to New York. She, too, finds the whole business mystifying, she says. Her daughter is too young to be on OnlyFans and, as a mother, she isn’t sure how comfortable she feels about a potential shift to the platform. But she says the weekend has been very instructive about the money that can be made from posting viral content on TikTok and YouTube.

Rockelle says she is careful not to expose the younger girls she collaborates with to her adult content: “She is 17, so I would never want to put a minor into that aspect.”

When we drive to see Luna at the stables, Rockelle says she would eventually like to buy a farm. She spends an hour with Luna and seems relaxed and happy as she walks around the paddock. It is important to step away from her online persona, she says: “Just turning off your phone, just taking a second to realise that the sky is blue and there’s grass and there’s such a beautiful light, instead of wasting it sitting looking at a stupid comment someone said about me.”

The story of her self-monetisation is also the strange story of a teenager who has spent most of her life being filmed. She thinks there has barely been a day since she was seven – when she inherited her mother’s old iPhone – that she hasn’t filmed herself and uploaded content. She has thought more than most people about the merits or otherwise of exposing children to smartphones and social media.

She would avoid letting her own children have smartphones too early, she says, and discourage them from posting about their lives on the internet. “It is a terrible place, especially if they’re my kid – a kid that knows their mum was doing this when she was younger. It’s why I’m hoping, at some point, I decide to let this part of my life go.”

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