Comment by Ozzie_osman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Ozzie_osman | Hacker News Reader

(Disclosure: I work on a startup in the personal finance space).

This is actually a much wider problem on two dimensions:

1. Beyond personal finance, a LOT of content out there right now is basically content marketing for something that's crafted more around "can it get SEO traffic" and "can it convert that traffic to something monetizable". It's just a giant funnel.

2. Even in personal finance, it's not just content. A lot of products that in theory should be helping you improve your finances are lead generation funnels too (especially the free ones). In other words, the marketing funnel extends beyond just content and pervades the very products we use.

For instance, a really popular (tens of millions of users) personal finance product just sent me an email recommending that I invest in art since "art has outperformed the S&P 500". It was an ad, but you'd have to read the fine print to see that. Another popular one (over 100M) has a tab on their site called "My Recommendations", with fine print saying "We suggest offers based on your credit, Approval Odds, and money we make from our partners". It's all for credit cards and personal loans.

A lot of the very old marketing in financial services was content marketing. So you have seen relatively little disruption amongst the most sophisticated marketers...they do the exact same thing they were doing three decades ago, they just send it by email instead of calling or mailing.

There are differences: Motley Fool and Simply Wall St are two example of "innovators" (nominally SEO but in reality they just got into Google Feeds when it was easy to get in).

My point though is that industry hasn't really changed. They are still selling the same dogshit products. As a startup, you have to literally drag your customers kicking and screaming away from stuff that will bankrupt them...every...single...one.

(I say this as someone who ran a startup in the space that failed and then went into wealth management...the industry is horrible, horrible, horrible...with my startup, I made a couple of thousand and had individual clients who made $100k+ with my advice...still wouldn't listen to reason. When I worked in wealth management, we had clients who had money with us, were doing well, and then sold their business and decided they needed the "big name" financial advisor who would rip their face off in fees...I remember seeing the marketing docs for one of these pitches...$2.5m liquid cash account, I actually laughed at how bad it was (they had tried to construct a stock portfolio to generate fees, it was basically an index tracker)...I now do something else because I was just so jaded...but the irrational behaviour of people is brutally different to comprehend...it is anything to do with financial literacy either, some people just have no common sense, Warren Buffett is an example of how to do things, he decided what he was going to do, only people who aligned with the mission joined him...obviously, that doesn't really work outside of asset management).

Credit Karma is interesting as they routinely have not differentiated between which things are informative and signals for your credit score and which things have nothing to do with that.

I believe they've gotten better after complaints and regulatory actions, but it is still largely ambiguous unless you know from other sources.

Personal finance is such a huge, profitable niche for YouTube. So much content, a lot of it machine-generated or paid. It's like an elite college in same way that there is an instructor for every student but rather a content writer or card offer for every viewer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com