NEED TO KNOW
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Brooke Monk grew up homeschooled and without a phone for the first 16 years of her life
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It wasn’t until COVID-19, when she began creating videos in her room, that she realized her quarantine hobby could become something slightly more than that
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Speaking with PEOPLE about her 2025 TikTok Award nomination for Creator of the Year, the influencer shares how she managed to go from creating videos alone in her room to amassing a follower presence of nearly
Brooke Monk’s parents didn’t let her get a phone until she was about 16 years old, but that didn’t stop her from later achieving internet stardom.
In fact, for a creator who has since amassed over 43 million followers on TikTok, it’s quite surprising when she tells PEOPLE that her family “as a whole isn’t super engaged with social media.”
“I don’t even think my parents have a TikTok, to be honest,” the influencer, 22, puzzles, laughingly.
Her parents, in particular, were very aware of social media safety as she was growing up, meaning that when she first got a phone, they were incredibly on top of her about being safe online.
So, when she first began making content online, around the same time that she got her first phone, she felt a “responsibility” to tell her parents.
“It was like a week after I started making [content], I told my mom, I was like, ‘Hey, like a couple thousand people followed me I’m just making little videos. This is what they are,'” she shares.
Monk recalls being shy about posting initially, as well as sharing it with her family. As a result, she says she felt sure that just a few weeks after beginning, when she told her dad about her new account, he probably chalked it up to just being a “little fling.”
She had tried a YouTube channel before (“Don’t go looking for it. I deleted it,” she laughs) to no avail, so the foray into social media wasn’t necessarily surprising to her parents. But perhaps it wasn’t necessarily clear just how well things were going for her.
Brooke Monk/TikTok
Brooke Monk.
“After two months, I was like, ‘Hey, I hit a million followers, goodnight,'” she says of revealing her success to her parents. “My parents were like, ‘Huh?'”
Now, the 22-year-old is nominated for Creator of the Year at the inaugural US TikTok Awards, going up against creator giants like Alix Earle and Keith Lee. Fans were able to cast their votes for their favorite creators in the TikTok app’s TikTok Awards hub from Nov. 18 to Dec. 2, and the final results will be unveiled during the award show on Dec. 18, which will be livestreamed on TikTok and on Tubi.
Speaking about her nomination, Monk reflects on her meteoric rise to fame online. “The fact that me making videos in my room can get me nominated for an award is kind of jarring in the best way possible,” she says.
During the COVID pandemic, things really began to blow up for Monk. If you were online at the time, it’s likely you came across her videos: humorous POVs depicting relatable moments from her life, especially ones featuring her experience as a teenager coming of age online during a global pandemic.
She was 17 at the time, and was creating content all throughout the early years of the pandemic, a trajectory that included a brief stint in the Hype House, a content creation collective based out of a Southern California mansion.
Monk was also homeschooled, meaning she didn’t have “a big social group” growing up, which further inspired her as she created content on TikTok.
“I was like, maybe I could relate to some people and make some friends online — I do not promote that as like being a safe thing to do — but that’s like what my mindset was going into it,” she explains.
Now, she perceives her 60 million followers across platforms as her “online friends.”
“It means so much,” she says of the response she’s gotten online. “I’m genuinely just filming little videos in my room, and I love doing it to the fact that people respond to that and engage with the content and relate to it. And it makes them feel either a sense of community or a sense of relatability or maybe just comedic relief through life.”
After she graduated at 17 — a year early for most — she took a gap year to decide if she wanted to go to college or continue with content creation.
“That was really the moment that I decided if this is possible and people continue to engage with my content and really like it, maybe there’s something more here than just as a hobby,” she says.
Monk’s platform only grew, and around mid-2020, she was getting recognized when out and about with family and friends at the mall and elsewhere.
“People started coming up to me, and I was like, ‘Is this like someone I’ve met?'” Brooke explains. “It was so jarring.”
Brooke Monk/Instagram
Brooke Monk.
Despite the public attention taking a minute to get used to, a career in social media hasn’t swayed Monk’s opinion of the platforms where she makes her living.
“My perspective on it has been, if there’s any doubt of am I being a kind and genuine person towards people, as long as I’m being kind and genuine, then I’m going for it.”
In fact, her biggest fear when it comes to her public-facing career is not if she will have a bad or strange interaction with fans, but rather the other way around.
“If someone had a negative experience with me and it was my responsibility… I would feel horrible,” she says. “I’d feel so much responsibility there. If it’s something that is a reflection of my character and how I treat people, I would feel awful.”
As a content creator, Monk says she feels a responsibility to her followers to be present and attentive, despite the pressures that a full-time career in content creation puts on those participating in constantly participating in generating content and sharing updates on their lives.
“You have a responsibility to make sure you’re being kind, you’re being attentive to people,” she explains. “I can’t imagine coming up to someone that like when I was younger that I like to watch like on YouTube, if they were dismissive.”
For Monk, “It’s just a blessing to have anybody paying attention.”
While some content creators push for a separation between their personal lives and their online lives, there’s one element of her personal life that Monk is completely fine with letting people in on — and, in fact, it’s become quite a large part of her content.
Brooke Monk/Instagram
Sam Dezz and Brooke Monk.
Monk’s boyfriend, fellow creator Sam Dezz, has consistently appeared in her videos — almost from the very outset. Their couples’ POVs and videos (like many of Monk’s solo posts) consistently earn views and likes into the millions. It’s the “best thing ever” for Monk, who says she and Dezz work together because they “genuinely love making content together.”
“A lot of times, we’ll see like fun trends and I’m like, I wanna just do that for fun anyway. We might as well just throw a camera up and post it.”
Dezz is no stranger to content creation either. He was creating content even before Monk was.
“If I was with someone where they weren’t comfortable with social media, they wouldn’t be on social media. I would a hundred percent respect that. But he is so down for anything,” she says, then jokingly adding, “I dressed him up as a minion.”
“I think that something you have to come to terms with, if you are online and you are going to choose to post your relationship as well,” she says of pressures to share things with her audience. “People aren’t entitled to information about it. They’re going to guess. And you have to accept that if you’re gonna choose to post.”
It’s just part of what has become ordinary for Monk, who says her days aren’t really out of the ordinary, despite her unbridled TikTok fame.
“I genuinely get up in the morning, I do my workout, I do like any work required, like meetings and such throughout the day and I create my content and I prioritize that,” she says. “I schedule out what I wanna do and then I just make food and watch a movie and go to sleep and hang out with my cats.”
It’s a “luxury,” she says, to be able to live the way she does.
“People might be surprised that with what I do,” she says, explaining that while it may seem like an entire team is behind her, the opposite is actually true. “It’s literally me and Sam, me and my iPhone.”
Read the original article on People
