“When I first started in the markets”: Expertise, relatability and advice in stories by YouTube’s finance influencers

The paper analyses the interactional functions of stories in YouTube videos where finance influencers (“finfluencers”) share advice relating to personal finance and wealth. Applying positioning theory on a dataset of 80 videos, this paper investigates self-presentation and the embedding of stories in this discourse context. The findings show that stories and the act of telling justify or elaborate recommendations and definitions and thereby seek to demonstrate the influencer’s expertise in finance. Stories aim to establish relatability by aligning the influencer, or rather their story-self, with the hypothetical viewer. Yet some stories about personal achievements seemingly disalign the successful finfluencer and their target audience of novices. The analysis suggests that story functions in finfluencer advice videos are different from story functions attested in the discourses of, for example, lifestyle influencers and peer-support forums due to differences in genre norms, target audience and discourse community.