The creator economy is sold as a young person's game. The research on trust says brands have been looking at the wrong birthdays.
Eileen Munoz spent 28 years in an insurance cubicle and never made more than $70,000 in a year. She was so burned out, she told Fortune, that she used to cry on Sundays.
In her mid-fifties she quit without a plan. A friend introduced her to user-generated content, where brands pay ordinary people to film videos about their products. In 2025, her second year doing it, she brought in roughly $500,000 from that work and from commissions on TikTok Shop, Fortune reported in August. Her niche is products for people in middle age: skin care, supplements, menopause and thinning hair.
"I thought, am I too old?" she said. "That is honestly the number one thing that I hear."
Her story is unusual. The pattern behind it, an older creator outperforming the assumptions about her age, is not.
The public image of a creator is somebody in their twenties. The data has long said otherwise. Back in 2022, Adobe polled more than 4,500 creators around the world and found that the average one was 40 years old, while Gen Z made up only 14% of the group, Fortune reported at the time. Millennials alone accounted for more than 40%.
Picture a room of a hundred creators. Fourteen are Gen Z. The typical person in the room is closer to a parent of a teenager than to a teenager.
What has changed is that marketers are starting to notice the gap. People in their forties, fifties and sixties still buy things, and someone has to sell to them.
"I definitely see that brands, but also influencer agencies, have a blind spot for age," Florian Dost, a marketing professor at Brandenburg University of Technology, told Fortune. "Selling new stuff to old consumers is the biggest marketing challenge of our day."
Dost co-authored a study that found a creator's apparent age can raise viewers' assumptions about their expertise, while perceived attractiveness tends to lower them. He described a "sweet spot" that varies by platform and product. In one TikTok experiment, the most credible apparent age fell between the late forties and the mid-fifties.
Munoz puts it more simply. "I will not buy skin care from a 19-year-old, 20-year-old, 30-year-old," she said. "I'm gonna buy from people my age."
That is the commercial logic of midlife creators in one sentence. Audiences trust people whose lives look like theirs, and a fifty-year-old talking about joints and skin is more believable than a teenager reading a script.
The trust effect does not stop at supplements. Across the creator economy, mid-sized creators who build a loyal following are increasingly where the steady money is. The Influencer Marketing Factory describes this "creator middle class" as accounts with roughly 10,000 to half a million followers, running lean businesses built on digital products, communities and services rather than viral hits.
Older women fit that model unusually well. They tend to know exactly who their audience is, because their audience is them.
The same holds in adult content, where experience is part of the appeal rather than a drawback. Women in their forties and fifties who publish on their own terms are their own category there, and a page of MILFs on OnlyFans, sorted by where they live and what they post, shows how wide that group has become, at least among women who claim the label themselves; ages there are stated, not checked.
Munoz now works from home in Diamond Bar, California, sets her own hours and hopes her income will let her husband retire too. The obstacle she hears about most from other people her age is the belief that social media belongs to someone younger.
"If you think you are too old to do UGC or TikTok Shop, that is such a lie," she said.
The creator economy was never only young. It just looked that way from the outside.