In the wave of social media, a group of “anti-aging grandparents” are rising. With their abundant energy and positive attitude towards life, they broke people’s traditional perception of the elderly and quickly became “top bloggers” on platforms such as Xiaohongshu and Douyin. These silver-haired old men have not only gained a large number of young fans, but also opened a unique road to commercialization. This article will provide an in-depth analysis of the trends behind this phenomenon: the transformation of silver-haired elderly people from onlookers to content producers, their account positioning, monetization models, and exploration of IP operations, revealing how “high-energy elderly” are redefining “age” through social media and bringing new possibilities for content creation and commercial monetization.
Recently, Xiaohongshu and Douyin have been completely conquered by a group of “anti-aging grandparents” – @梅英阿嬷, @周大爷不服老! @霞士比亚…… They range in age from 60 to 90, but they have amazing energy and enthusiasm: getting up at six o’clock, doing morning exercises in the park, shopping for groceries, playing mahjong, cooking…… Spending a day with full energy made many young people feel ashamed of themselves, and could only sigh that they were “twenty-year-old people watching ninety-year-old girls”.
Under the huge age contrast, grandma-level bloggers quickly gained the love of a large number of young people, and even some bloggers gained nearly one million fans on the whole network in a single month, and started their own road to commercialization.
(1) Silver-haired old man: from onlooker to content producer
According to the 55th Statistical Report on the Development of China’s Internet Network, as of December 2024, the number of netizens aged 60 and above in China reached 156 million, and the Internet penetration rate exceeded 52.5%. This means that more than 100 million silver-haired people are accelerating their integration into the digital society and becoming a core user group that cannot be ignored on social platforms. On social media, topics related to the elderly continue to increase. On Xiaohongshu and Douyin, the topic of “grandparents” reached 690 million and 10.53 billion respectively.
These silver-haired old people have broken through the role of “onlookers” and have shown strong content production capabilities. According to a joint study by the Population and Development Research Center of Chinese Min University and Douyin, as of April 2021, creators over the age of 60 on the Douyin platform have produced more than 600 million videos and received 40 billion likes. In a set of data disclosed by Xiaohongshu on January 6 this year, the number of users over the age of 60 will exceed the 30 million mark by the end of 2024, and the number of elderly creators will triple in two years, with a total of more than 100 million notes published.
To achieve these three challenges, product managers will only continue to appreciate
Good product managers are very scarce, and product managers who understand users, business, and data are still in demand when they go out of the Internet. On the contrary, if you only do simple communication, inefficient execution, and shallow thinking, I am afraid that you will not be able to go through the torrent of the next 3-5 years.
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The elderly with silver hair not only posted a lot, but also many people became the “top stream” of social platforms. As of June 5, 2025, there are at least 77 silver developed people with more than one million fans on Douyin, of which @Pan Grandma and @我是田姥姥 have 34.288 million and 34.544 million followers respectively; On Xiaohongshu, according to Gray Dolphin data, there are 221 creators with family roles as “grandma”, of which 7 are among the million fan clubs.
The account positioning of these “top-tier” silver-haired elderly people is different, but the daily sharing of life always occupies the core C position. Different from the twilight old age life in the public impression, they reconstructed the image of silver hair with a distinct “anti-age narrative”: 60-year-old @ Uncle Zhou insists on strength training every day, and incarnates as Disney’s “old baby” on holidays to show his youthful heart; @时尚奶奶团 Break through the traditional aesthetics of the elderly, and interpret the style of silver-haired supermodels with haute couture fashion; @孟小琦与爷爷 is taken by the granddaughter, who takes the grandfather to experience the novelties of young people.
In addition, some elderly people with silver hair have also begun to share knowledge and skills with the trust brought by more than 30 years of professional experience: @郑奶奶科学育儿 With 40 years of parenting experience, they help novice parents take care of their little month-old babies; Retired professor of Tongji University @ Grandma Wu who does not brush the question Starting from life, take everyone to explore the mysteries of physics; @pearlgrandma, who works in multiple pearl associations, will take you to learn more about the production process of pearls.
However, compared with the distribution of young creators, the creative fields of the elderly are relatively limited, which also brings about the characteristics of their relatively consistent commercialization.
(2) Top monetization: the road to commercialization of grandma-level bloggers
Although grandma-level bloggers are not young, most of their fans are young people. Taking @周成成 as an example, the core fans of his Douyin account are concentrated in 18-30 years old (accounting for about 36.49%), while on Xiaohongshu, his fans aged 18-34 account for 64.2%. Therefore, the commercialization of these silver-haired bloggers also revolves around the consumption of young people.
Still taking Uncle Zhou as an example, in the past 180 days of content release on Xiaohongshu, Uncle Zhou has cooperated a total of 9 times, and food and beverages and 3C and electrical appliances that are closer to daily life are the main categories. At the same time, due to Uncle Zhou’s old urchin label, the game industry accounts for a lot of cooperation; On Douyin, Uncle Zhou’s account has also opened a window, and 43 products are on the shelves, of which food and beverages still account for the majority. In addition, Uncle Zhou also simultaneously opened a local life exploration business, focusing on hot pot catering and offline entertainment scenes.
It is worth noting that although live streaming has become one of the main ways for bloggers to increase fans and monetize, silver-haired bloggers rarely open live broadcasts. The reason is also very straightforward: although silver-haired bloggers always seem full of energy in videos, most of their physical strength and early bedtime and early rise schedule still struggle to support high-intensity live broadcasts. According to the “New Career Development Report of Online Anchors” released by the Online Performance (Live Broadcast) Branch of the China Performance Industry Association, more than 60% of professional online anchors will broadcast more than four days a week in 2023, and 57.4% of the anchors who start broadcasting every day will broadcast more than 6 hours a day.
Therefore, in order to improve the commercialization space of the accounts of the elderly, on the one hand, the operators of the elderly have opened the distribution and slicing authorization of the whole platform, and on the other hand, some silver bloggers have begun to move their families. Taking @Pan Grandma as an example, in March 2020, Grandma Pan and her son Chu Xiujun formed a short video production team to shoot and produce short videos of plots and food together, and more and more family members started their short video careers in the future. According to Pan Pan’s Douyin account, his son @ Chu Jun (Pan Grandma’s son), daughter @ Ping Jie (Pan Grandma’s daughter), granddaughter @ Yuan’er, wife @ Chu Grandpa (Pan Grandma’s wife) and photographer @ Da Pan’s vlog (Pan Grandma Photographer) have all opened Douyin accounts.
Compared with life bloggers, silver bloggers in vertical fields show obvious differences in commercialization paths. Taking maternal and infant science blogger @Zheng Grandma Scientific Parenting as an example, Gray Dolphin data shows that the commercial monetization of Douyin accounts is highly dependent on live streaming: sales in the past 30 days can reach the range of 2.5 million yuan to 5 million yuan, of which 88% are contributed by live broadcasts, which is several times that of ordinary life bloggers; At the same time, Grandma Zheng’s live broadcast frequency is also more intensive, with a total of 10 live broadcasts in the past 30 days, and the duration of a single live broadcast generally exceeds 8 hours. However, it can be seen from the specific live video that Grandma Zheng did not participate in the whole live broadcast, but the little assistant took on the important task of explaining the product. Similarly, @pearl grandma also relies on live broadcasts to bring goods to its own pearls in commercialization, and its monthly sales have reached 50 million to 75 million in the past 30 days. However, even so, its commercialization space will be limited by the physical strength and age of the elderly.
(3) Business iteration: IP of the silver track
How to retain the content characteristics of silver-haired bloggers while greatly improving their commercialization space? Some institutions have explored a path: personality IP.
Although today we can still see many silver-haired bloggers marking “no team” and “no company” in their profiles, and the operation is mainly handled by their own families, in fact, as early as 2018, many MCNs opened up special tracks. Founded in 2019, @Fashion Grandma Group was created by Beijing Lingwen Tianxia Culture Media Co., Ltd. According to an interview with Southern Weekly, in 2019, founder He Daling recruited 4 grandmothers with extraordinary temperament from the elderly model team and planned a special catwalk in Sanlitun, Beijing. Dressed in batik cheongsam and graceful grandmothers, they attracted the attention of many people as soon as they appeared, and the relevant video received more than 40 million views and 2 million likes a day after it was released. Subsequently, the fashion grandma group started the road of IP operation.
In 2021, the Fashion Granny Group opened a membership club. It is not a square dance brigade, not an interest club, not a common university for the elderly, but a platform has been established with fashion as the keyword to gather grandmothers with the same concept. Here, grandmas can learn about fashion and participate in offline parties. Similar to the model of the knowledge payment community, this club also charges, although the subsequent fee has been adjusted to 365 yuan, the first phase fee is still as high as 1,699 yuan. This IP + membership club model gets rid of the model of relying solely on the traffic of silver bloggers for monetization, allowing the energy of the elderly to be released. However, the way of gathering a large number of silver-haired people and forming a private domain to monetize again has also been criticized by many people.
The Fashion Granny Group is not the first team to try IP and commercialization, and @老飯bone, which is composed of senior masters in the culinary industry, has also started commercialization in recent years.
In 2019, “Uncle” Zheng Xiusheng, “Second Uncle” Sun Lixin, and “Third Uncle” Wu Jianli opened an account on Douyin and called themselves “Old Fan Bone”. Subsequently, with the expansion of influence, Lao Fan Gu also began commercial experiments. In September 2019, Lao Fan Gu launched its first product, “Stir-fried Fine Iron Pot”, which sold more than 8,000 mouthpieces in 4 hours, and the initial attempt was successful, which also opened the curtain on the commercialization of Lao Fan Bone. In December 2020, Lao Fan Gu was launched on Tmall and launched 23 products jointly developed by state banquet masters, and the following year, 618 Lao Fan Gu participated in the 618 event, and the core product Little Lion Head directly sold 1.3 million copies.
But the commercialization of old rice bones did not stop there. From IP incubation to new consumer brand incubation, its commercialization model has also extended from simply selling goods to both ends. According to Hu Liwen, the head of Xia Entropy Technology behind Lao Fan Bone, Lao Fan Gu not only established a R&D center, but also extended its tentacles to the market, signing more than 130 catering takeaway stores in 9 cities including Beijing, Hangzhou and Nanjing. So far, the commercial value of Lao Fan Gu is not only an account and an IP, but a new consumer brand with its own traffic.
epilogue
From the emergence of silver-haired bloggers in 2019 to the current “high-energy old people” sweeping social platforms, the silver-haired track has shown vigorous vitality. However, the value of silver-haired bloggers lies not only in their traffic and influence, but also in their redefinition of the concept of “age”: they use age as their unique IP and use life wisdom and content creation to break the traditional perception of “silver hair is elimination”. But under the traffic, their road to commercialization is not smooth – factors such as physical strength and age make it difficult for most silver-haired bloggers to monetize as frequently as young creators. In the future, how to balance content authenticity and commercialization needs may become a common thinking for the industry.
This article is the surging number Paike Technology × slow playback, the exclusive debut of the Paike Technology column, and it is prohibited to forward it without permission.
