Lillian Droniak is 96. On social media she is Grandma Droniak, and she has 15 million followers.
In June she went viral after saying her retirement home had threatened to evict her for throwing parties. The home confirmed the threat and then settled with her: she can keep partying, but may not supply the alcohol.
The money is not incidental. Brand deals cover her nursing home fees of $12,000 a month (about £9,000), with the remainder going into a college fund for her great-grandchildren. Her grandson, who first started helping her post in 2020 out of boredom, edits the sponsored content.
“I always knew I had it in me to be famous, I just didn’t think it would happen in my 90s,” she told the BBC’s Yasmin Rufo.
Her read on why it works is about her audience rather than herself. “They think old people just sit and stare at a wall but I’m showing it’s not that bad to get old. We embrace it, can still have fun and I’m still partying and going out sometimes.”
At the retirement home, she notes, the fame does not register at all. “They don’t get it as they don’t go on TikTok.”
Why brands pay more
This is the part worth extracting from the human interest. Naomi Barker of the influencer marketing agency We Are Social says older creators appeal to brands because they tend to have “deeply established, highly loyal” communities with greater purchasing power — and that, she says, “carries a massive premium”.
Follower count is the metric everyone quotes. Loyalty and disposable income are the metrics that get paid. Those are not the same thing, and the gap between them is where the money in this market actually sits.
Barker adds a second explanation for the appeal: older creators “offer comfort in an uncertain world”, and their content can function as a “virtual grandma” for viewers who do not have one.
Four businesses, four different models
Viv Truran, 82, from Cardiff, started posting on Instagram after losing her husband, when a neighbour suggested filming her outfits. She now has more than 800,000 followers, makes two videos a day from a bedroom-turned-studio, and shows off her clothes, 22 pairs of glasses and two drawers of scarves. She keeps a handwritten notebook tracking followers and views — she is on book five.
She is deliberate about what she accepts: a couple of sponsored posts a month, prioritising local brands and charities. She recently did an Age UK campaign with Innocent Drinks that paid several thousand pounds. “I’ve turned down some big deals because it’s not my thing,” she said. “I’m very picky about who I work with, I have to really love the brand.”
Younger women stop her in the street to say they are “frightened of getting old”. She tells them it is not that bad.
Grace Geramita, 83 — Nonna Gracie — has millions of followers watching her cook recipes she has made for decades. She moved from Italy to the US at 18 and worked multiple jobs to raise two daughters; she now earns more than she did in any previous job. Her grandson Matthew suggested filming six years ago, and she resisted, knowing nothing about social media and saying she does not “speak very good English”. Her content is only nominally about food: she says she wants to pass on the “tradition of bringing family together around the table”.
Barbara Costello, 77, a former teacher, posts cooking, cleaning and homemaking videos as Brunch with Babs. Her followers tell her she reminds them of their own mothers; some call her “the mom I never had”. She works with brands but is careful about what she will put her name on.
What this says about the platforms
Almost every one of these accounts was started by a grandchild, for fun, and then became a business. None of them was a content strategy. Each found an audience several decades younger than the creator, which is precisely the segmentation the advertising industry assumes does not exist.
It is a useful corrective for anyone here building a following and assuming the only viable formats are the ones already crowded with twenty-year-olds. The scarce commodity on these platforms is not youth and it is not polish. It is a reason to come back tomorrow.
Related: inside the clipping business.
