Law Student Makes $1.3 Million a Year Posting Adult Content (Exclusive)

When Emily Cocea was a college student at Carnegie Mellon University, her days would begin much like her peers: She’d wake up in her dorm, get ready for the day and head to lecture. After class, like many college students, she’d go to her part-time job, where she worked throughout school to be able to afford the school’s $90,000 annual sticker price.

Cocea received her bachelor’s degree from the highly selective school in Pittsburgh, Pa., in May. But over her four years at CMU, Cocea wasn’t picking up shifts at the library or working at a local coffee shop to pay her tuition bills. Her alternative was far more lucrative: posting adult content online for her millions of followers, through which she raked in roughly $1.3 million a year.

Just five years ago, dollar sums of that scale were unheard of for Cocea. The creator, who is now 22, was born and raised in Los Angeles. From as early as she can remember, she wanted to be a lawyer.

“The origin of the story is a little bit sad,” Cocea tells PEOPLE about her start in content creation in an interview with PEOPLE.

When she was 15, her dad died unexpectedly, throwing her family into what she describes as “really severe financial unrest.” As a result, Cocea says, she knew that if she was serious about her dreams of pursuing a career in law, she would have to finance it herself — and that her job at McDonald’s was not going to cut it.

At the time, social media platform TikTok was still in its infancy, but Cocea saw it for what it would become: an opportunity to grow a massive audience of followers that, when she would later turn 18, could become a revenue stream as she left L.A. for her secondary degree. 

Still in high school, she opened four separate TikTok accounts, each with a slightly different version of herself, so that she could “test out the TikTok algorithm and best understand what kind of personality type would be the most engaging to the audience I was trying to acquire,” she tells PEOPLE.

That audience? 

“Men in the demographic of 18 to 24, specifically working in tech,” Cocea says. “They tend to have liquidity, which means money to spend on me.”

By the time she turned 18 during the March of her senior year of high school, she had refined the schoolgirl persona that now makes her millions, which she dubbed “hotblockchain,” and she could finally start to monetize her platform. Over the next year, she earned about $250,000, and she’s made checks in the millions every year since.

But that money did not come without an extremely diligent work schedule. After her college lectures ended around 2 p.m., she’d head back to her dorm room and switch on a Twitch livestream. To keep up with her classes, Cocea incorporated studying into her streams, essentially re-giving the lectures she had just attended for her followers — all part of the persona she was cultivating online.

“I realized I will never be the prettiest girl in the world,” she says plainly, describing the niche she’s carved for herself online. “But what I can be is the girl who sells exclusive content and is in school. The character was bolstered by the fact that I’m getting on Twitch and giving you the lectures — and I have big boobs.”

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

Cocea doesn’t have many boundaries — at the start of her interview, she says, daringly, “There’s nothing I’m uncomfortable answering” — but there is a major one for her social media presence: she’s never posted nude content. 

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Instead, she describes her photos and videos, which are sometimes in skimpy bathing suits or lingerie, as “lewd.” In reality, much of what she is selling, she says, is a relationship with her followers.

“For the most part, especially when you don’t do porn, people subscribe to you because they like you and they want to talk to you,” she says. In addition to the streams, which would often last around five hours a day, Cocea would spend two more hours personally responding to her followers who paid the fee to be able to message her.

Says Cocea: “I would say, first I sell relationships, and second I sell pictures of me looking sexy in bikinis.”

Even as her follower count was rapidly climbing — from 27,000 on Instagram when she got to CMU to the 1.2 million she has now — she still had the regular commitments of a full-time student.

“It was really, really, really hard,” she says of the balance, noting that during her sophomore year, as she was taking a notoriously difficult course about matrices, she temporarily stepped away from streaming.

In the early months of college, as Cocea was still growing her following to the behemoth it is today, she would also have to deal with the occasional comments from her classmates.

“I would get clowned a little bit,” she admits. But pretty quickly, those snide remarks turned into genuine curiosity from her peers — many of whom were in science or technology fields — over whether they could use her follower base for school projects.

“All my research groups would have great sample sizes,” she laughs. “My peers started to know that this was a job to make money, and they inherently respected that.”

As college came to a close, Cocea directed her attention to law school, as she had always planned. She scored a jaw-dropping 172 on the LSAT, placing her in the 99th percentile of test-takers. But the true “labor of love,” she says, was the written portion of the application process.

“I had a bunch of different versions of my essays where I strayed away from talking about social media,” she says. “And then my best friend Jordan was like, ‘This isn’t you. Your passion in large part derives from the kind of person you are’ ” — a person who posted adult content online.

In the application to her dream school — the University of Michigan, to which she said she was drawn for its public defender program — Cocea reflected on the immense privilege she had been granted through her seven-figure annual income, and how, even flush with cash, she still had a desire to go to bat in court for the most vulnerable people.

“Why the f— would I want to be at a mansion party in Malibu,” she asks, referencing the luxe life of an influencer, “when I could be here with the skills I know I have, helping the people I need it?”

She remembers in vivid detail the exact moment she opened her Michigan acceptance letter: Cocea was actually on the phone with another girl in college who posted adult content and was telling her she was worried that her R-rated online presence might make it difficult to find employment after school.

“It was poetic,” says Cocea. “I got the email that I was accepted to the University of Michigan, that I had been given a giant scholarship to do it, and I just burst into tears. I texted my same best friend Jordan, ‘I’m going to be a lawyer.’ And she said, ‘You always were going to be one.’ ”

As Cocea describes her long road to law school to PEOPLE, she sits in her bedroom in the exclusive on-campus Lawyers Club housing at Michigan — the same room she can be seen dancing to trendy sounds on her TikTok account — and has only glowing things to say about her first semester.

The classes are “rigorous,” the workload is “hard,” but “you’re just surrounded by brilliant, kind, compassionate people,” she says. “This is the greatest privilege in the world.”

Cocea admits that, like in those early months at CMU, she’s become a bit of an “enigma” on campus for her unconventional side hustle, and she faces the occasional question about how she thinks she can “work in big law.” (“I’m like, ‘Sister, that is not the goal,’ ” she laughs, describing her plans to become a public defender.)

“But everyone here is really respectful and fantastic,” she says. “And I have a couple people who come up to me throughout the day and are like, ‘Hey, I have this great idea for a TikTok trend.’ It’s just the cutest thing ever, honestly.”

While it may seem a ways away, Cocea has big plans for her life after law school. She wants to start as a public defender, probably “for a couple years,” she says, before transitioning into an assistant professor fellowship to return back to the academic world.

“I love to teach,” Cocea says (she did rake in thousands re-giving her undergraduate lectures, after all).

But on the side, adds Cocea, she would love to pick up some pro bono work supporting other girls in the adult entertainment space — friends she’s made as a Playboy Bunny who need a lawyer to help protect them in a notoriously predatory industry or to get leaked nude photos taken down online.

“I would love to help them out,” she says. “It’s as simple as a cease and desist letter to some a—— who won’t leave them alone, and I’d have no problem attaching my name to that.”

At the end of her interview, when asked if there’s anything else she would like to add before ending the Zoom, Cocea returns to a theme she’s been circling since she hopped on the call: that in our contemporary day and age, participation in the adult content industry does not have to foreclose other kinds of achievements.

“This is not a barrier to scholastic or professional success,” she tells PEOPLE, adamantly. “If you want it enough, if you’re smart enough, that comes through in the interview and that definitely comes through in the test score. I know a lot of girls who have said, ‘Oh, well I did this for money, but now I feel like I couldn’t go back to school or anything.’ And I think you always can.” 

For Cocea, at least, that appears to be the case.