Law Student Earning $1.5M a Year from Adult Content Reveals Her Classmates' Unexpected Reaction to Her Profession

 

Emily Cocea, a 22-year-old law student at the University of Michigan, makes $1.5 million a year posting and selling adult content online
The creator sat down with PEOPLE, detailing her journey balancing academics with her pursuits in the adult entertainment industry
Cocea reveals the surprising reaction her peers have had when they’ve learned about her side hustle
Emily Cocea understands that her side profession is unconventional.

The 22-year-old law student, who is in her first year at the University of Michigan, has similar dreams to her peers: After she graduates, she wants to become a public defender to help some of the most underprivileged people. What distinguishes her, however, is that she rakes in an estimated $1.5 million a year from posting and selling adult content online.

Cocea first started her journey with social media out of financial necessity, she tells PEOPLE in an interview.

“The origin of the story is a little bit sad,” she says.

When she was 15, her dad died unexpectedly, throwing her family into what she describes as “really severe financial unrest.” But Cocea had lifelong dreams of becoming a lawyer, and she knew that if she wanted to make those dreams a reality, she would have to fund the necessary (and pricey) academic degrees herself.
While she was in high school, Cocea started four different TikTok accounts, each of which emphasized slightly different elements of her personality, which she tailored over the next few years to learn what could be most appealing to her target demographic — men aged 18 to 24 working in tech, who she says “tend to have liquidity, which means money to spend on me.”

When she turned 18 in March of her senior year, she had perfected her online schoolgirl persona, which she named “hotblockchain,” and was able to start monetizing her platform. During that first year, Cocea earned roughly $250,000 by posting photos and videos to her public accounts, selling access to exclusive messages and regularly livestreaming from her dorm room. In the years since, that annual income has climbed into the millions.

For her bachelor’s degree, Cocea attended the highly selective Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pa., where she admits she initially turned heads when her peers discovered the source of her income.

“The first couple months of school, I would get clowned a little bit,” she admits to PEOPLE.

When she enrolled at CMU, she had a mere 27,000 followers on Instagram; by the time she graduated, that number was well over a million. And the larger her following became, the more curious her classmates became.

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