Looking at my new fascinating woopra statistics, I clicked on a few of the keywords that appear in the dashboard. I noticed that there are several advertisements (adwords) that appear in Google results related to peer-to-peer lending. So I searched on several related key terms to see what appeared in the google paid search results. I thought that I would save the results so that I can later compare how these results change over time since changes in the paid advertisements may indicate changes in the P2P lending market.

Key Word: Prosper
Results: 14 million results
Paid Search results include:

• Lending Club
• peerlendingreview.com – I’ll mention this site more later.
• MicroPlace advertising for “invest to end poverty”
• Prospers.org – the Prospers.org site seems to be down now because it says “Coming soon!” when I click on the link.

Key Word: Prosper Quiet Period
Results: 33 thousand results
Paid Search results include:

• fred93.blogspot.com

I clicked on the link to Fred’s blog and it takes me to Fred’s home page. I think the results would be more effective if it linked directly to a post summarizing Fred’s issues with Prosper. However, I did notice that Fred’s Prosper late stats have been updated which is always a shocker to see. Some early months of Prosper lending are seeing more nearly 40% of the loans showing up as late.

Key Word: Lending Club
Results: 5,050,000 results
Paid Search results include:

• Lending Club
• PeerLendingReview for the ad “Peer Lending Exposed”

Key Word: P2P Lending
Results: 5,050,000 results
Paid Search results include:

• Lending Club
• Business.com
• PeerLendingReview for the ad “Peer Lending Warning”
• An ad for Mortgage quotes
• An ad for “Peer Lending Paydays” advertising faxless payday loans

Interestingly, I went back to search for P2P Lending a while later and noticed that the advertisements displayed completely changed. Here are the later search results.

Back to PeerLendingReview.com — it seems to be a simple page to encourage sign ups to Lending Club through the affiliate links. However, the page is awful. It claims to a review or to provide you some kind of warning but all it does is link you over to Lending Club to sign up for the service. The page announces “lending club reviewed so that you don’t have to.” It actually says “Lending Club was found to better than Lending Club” and then proclaims “lending club Alternative” (exact case) because my search was for the lower case “lending club.” Here is the page if you would like to see it:

Peer Lending Review - Thin Affiliate Page