Opportunistic exploitation has marked the rise of finfluencers

livemint.com:

real estate. So, what explains their popularity and why have they become popular only in recent years? There are several reasons. First, the rise of cheap smartphones and rock-bottom internet rates have led to increased individual content-viewing on smartphones, as opposed to families watching TV together earlier.

This has led to people watching stuff on YouTube, Instagram, etc, and helped everyone from streaming platforms and famous journalists running their own YouTube channels to finfluencers. Second, the work-from-home covid years gave people more time to watch content, helping finfluencers showcase their content and build an audience. Third, unlike financial advisors on TV, finfluencers spoke to a young generation—newcomers to the world of money—in a language they understand.

Fourth, whether or not finfluencers have a good understanding of what they are speaking about, they do so with a lot of confidence. This helps get credibility. As Dan Gardner writes in Future Babble: “If someone’s confidence is high, we believe they are probably right: if they are less certain, we feel they are less reliable." Indeed, finfluencers are able to do this because their target audience is largely unaware of the subjects they are speaking about, and is often looking for some hand-holding.

Fifth, their sales pitch is typically built on the proposition that “if I can do it, so can my followers," which is why any nuance is usually edited out and any talk of luck that one needs or the risk that one faces while investing goes out of the window. This helps cater to a mass market. Most people are already busy handling the pressures of daily life.