Financial Education in Brazil on YouTube : A Content Analysis Based on Machine Learning With Topic Models

Financial education is a topic that has become increasingly important worldwide. In recent years, several channels have appeared on YouTube dealing with financial education. The experience of these content producers is quite diverse: some are professional financial advisors with extensive training, while others are beginners who share their financial experiences. This study aims to analyze the supply of financial education (understood as the content that is posted by youtubers) and the demand for financial education (understood as the visualization of this content by users) in order to understand how worried Brazilians are with this theme. An innovative approach based on a machine learning instrument, probabilistic topic modeling, was used to analyze and label video transcriptions. The topics generated were divided into categories proposed from the premise that the concepts treated in financial education present varying stages of sophistication and complexity, which individuals learns gradually, with the aim of improving their financial well-being. The analysis of the indicators of supply and demand reveals that Brazilians looking for financial education content on YouTube are more concerned with less sophisticated themes and more focused on the short term, thus confirming our initial hypothesis, since in Brazil a culture of savings and investment has not been created, it is still a developing economy, it has social inequality and deficiencies in education. The results may contribute to the development of public policies that make the population aware of the importance of long-term financial planning