Why Finance Gurus Switched Their Bait From Millions to Thousands of Dollars (Published 2021) (2024)

This video would be just one of dozens about potential stimulus packages posted that day, even that evening — many of them from finance influencers like Paffrath, whose pitches normally involve real estate, stocks or airline points. A year ago, they were promising to share their proprietary secrets for achieving wealth, staging monologues in the drivers’ seats of luxury cars and poolside on cruise ships. Brian Kim, a Chicago accountant, had previously been explaining tax preparation, including how high-earners could reduce their obligations; Ramy Wahby once raised a complimentary glass of Champagne from a first-class airplane seat and offered to explain how he used airline rewards to get there. Now all that had changed. The thumbnails on their channels may have kept their usual style — buffoonish facial expressions, glaring yellow text — but it was videos about stimulus checks that came to dominate their feeds. They vied for the role of soothsayer before a rapt audience with a seemingly insatiable demand for information about when the government would offer financial relief.

Personal-finance influencers turned out to be naturals for this part. They were already performing as the shamans of a core American mythology: that though the world may be divided into haves and have-nots, the only thing standing between you and life among the haves was some arcane savvy. The influencers were exactly like you, they promised; it’s just that they had cracked the code and would, in their magnanimity, break a taboo to share its secrets with you. (Simply sign up for their classes, buy their books and use the appropriate coupon codes at checkout.) Their shift to stimulus content was sudden and significant, but it was merely a change to the type of knowledge in which their enlightened-everyman personas were trained: Instead of decoding real estate or cryptocurrencies, they opined on means-testing and party politics.

In Paffrath’s case, stimulus-check updates began doubling his other videos in view counts; one update became the most popular video on his channel, with 1.1 million views. For other finance gurus, these updates took over their output entirely. Their audiences grew dramatically, but the shift required a tacit admission: that the people they had been teasing with paths to affluence had ended up sitting around with everyone else, hoping for a check.

Viewer demand didn’t come from upward-bound entrepreneurs after all, it seemed, but rather from those enduring the kind of precarity where the precise timing of a $2,000 deposit could mean keeping the lights on or the difference between housing and eviction. These audiences didn’t want yesterday’s news, or even this morning’s; the slightest budge toward progress was meaningful and welcome. So the output of YouTube updates was relentless: Every hour, a glut of new videos provided the latest on whether relief was coming and how many dollars of it were likely to arrive.