Piper Rockelle knew she wanted to be famous since she was a little kid. The YouTube-star-turned-OnlyFans-creator first began dreaming of a career in entertainment when she was just 4 years old.
While watching the TLC reality show Toddlers & Tiaras, which followed child beauty pageant contestants and their families, she pointed at the screen and said: “I can do that.”
“And I can do better than them,” her mother Tiffany Smith, when speaking to The Los Angeles Times in December 2022, recalled her daughter insisting.
From that point on, her mother, who was at the center of a child abuse scandal as her manager, fully committed to Rockelle’s ambitions. She began her career in child beauty pageants as a preschooler, though she soon became dissatisfied with the industry, and transitioned to the app Musical.ly, a precursor to TikTok that let users upload short lip-syncing videos, where she started to garner fame at age 7.
With her mom’s approval, Rockelle created an account with a friend and quickly rose to become one of the 10 most-viewed creators in 2016. That November, a social media producer approached the mother-daughter duo, offering to represent Rockelle, and suggested she start her own YouTube channel.
Splitting her time between Georgia and Los Angeles, Rockelle posted her first video to the site in March 2017 and soon began appearing with a rotating cast of similarly tween-aged friends known as “The Squad.” Made up of aspiring social media creators with their own channels, the group of child influencers was inspired by Jake Paul’s Team 10 collective.
Following in the footsteps of Paul and his older brother, Logan Paul, Rockelle’s self-titled YouTube channel featured The Squad engaging in an array of elaborate pranks and silly stunts. In one clip, with more than 8.4 million views, the group spun a wheel of potential dares, such as picking someone else’s nose or getting covered in spoiled milk. The last person to refuse a challenge won a cash prize of $10,000.
These antics proved immensely popular and lucrative and by 2022, Rockelle’s videos had amassed more than 1.87 billion views. Companies like NBCUniversal and Disney paid the influencer to promote their products on social media.
Today, the 18-year-old is using her talents as a content creator on the adult subscription-based platform OnlyFans, and she’s already seen instant success—making nearly $3 million on her first day in January 2026.
“I’m just kind of getting my freedom,” she told TMZ. “I’ve always been told that I’m doing something wrong or that I shouldn’t be showing my body like this … It’s just funny as I feel free and like I can do whatever I want cause I'm 18 years old and nobody really can tell me different.”
Rockelle’s swift leap to OnlyFans is explored in an episode of ABC News Studios’ documentary series IMPACT x Nightline, “Piper Rockelle: Barely Legal,” which is now available to stream on Disney+ and Hulu.
Catherine Caruso joined the Biography.com staff in August 2024, having previously worked as a freelance journalist for several years. She is a graduate of Syracuse University, where she studied English literature. When she’s not working on a new story, you can find her reading, hitting the gym, or watching too much TV.
