Lukas Pakter runs a creator platform with roughly 280,000 people on it. Asked recently who is actually making money, he did not describe a 22-year-old with a ring light.

Pakter, founder of the creator-sales platform Trybe and an activewear brand, said the creators earning the most on Trybe are older men and women. "The creators that make a ton of money on Trybe, at least as of the last couple of weeks, have been like older women, older men," he said. The platform has about 280,000 creators.

This isn't an engagement claim

That distinction is the whole story. Pakter pays creators roughly 10% of the sales their ads generate. Creators on the platform commonly earn 10% to 15% of the sales their content drives, with the brand setting the rate.

So when he says older creators are earning the most, he isn't talking about likes, watch time or comment sections. He's talking about who moves product. The money only exists if somebody buys.

His explanation is one coaches will recognize immediately. Pakter said older creators can start earning faster because audiences find them "more trustworthy." He said an "overwhelming majority" of his own brand's fastest-growing creators are "older guys," and he advised brands to sample and recruit them.

The operator behind the opinion

This is not a man theorizing from a newsletter. Pakter said his brand generated $1 million in 2024 and a little under $9 million last year, and he projected $70 million to $80 million this year. The brand now runs about 8,000 creatives a month, and he said customer acquisition cost fell from about $89 a year ago to $29.

Trybe launched in March 2026 and reports more than 17,000 brands on the platform.

He's also unimpressed by the shortcut everyone is being sold. Pakter dismissed platforms claiming AI can run an entire creative engine as "horseshit."

Why this lands differently for coaches

The obvious caveat: this is direct-to-consumer product advertising, not a $9,000 leadership package. Nobody buys an executive coaching container the way they buy leggings, and Pakter's own framing is modest — he was describing the last couple of weeks of payouts, not a longitudinal study.

But the mechanism he's describing is the one coaching runs on. Perceived credibility shortens the distance between seeing someone and believing them. Decades of actual work read on a face as proof. That's the single asset a 52-year-old has in abundance and a 24-year-old cannot manufacture, and it's apparently worth real commission dollars on a performance-paid platform.

The short-form industry has spent five years telling experienced professionals they arrived too late, that the camera belongs to people who grew up on it. Here's an operator with sales attribution running through his own ad account telling brands the opposite: go find the older ones, send them samples, put them to work.