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: Read the rest of this entry »

There are two great ways that you can support peer to peer lending with a simple mouse click.

1) Vote for Kiva.org — the micro lending site for entrepreneurs in the developing world in the Crunchies which are a major web award. Vote at the 2008 crunchies website under the category of most likely to make the world a better place.

2) Vote for Uncrunch America at Change.org which is being sponsored by Lending Club. Uncrunch America is a newly formed NGO that has been submitted to help change America using the voting system on Change.org. It is based upon the idea that there is lots of money available but hoarded and lots of people in need of money. The top three ideas will be moved to a second round of voting for a runoff election. The the overall top 10 ideas for changing America will be presented to the new administration on Inauguration Day.

About Uncrunch America from Change.org: Read the rest of this entry »

For Christmas I posted the free Kiva gift certificate. Tom from Prospser Lending Review redeemed it, but there are no loans open on Kiva right now for him to use the certificate.

From the scrolling banner on Kiva’s site about the impact that Kiva lenders have made this week:

$1,005,000.00 lent.
12,817 lenders made a loan.
17,329 gift certificates purchased.
15,002 new lenders joined.
2,874 entrepreneurs funded.
1 loan was made every 25 seconds.

AMAZING!

I also gave a certificate away on Facebook and my friend redeemed it for this loan:

Mr. Yous Ba Try, 35, is married and lives with his wife and a ten year-old child in a part of Phnom Penh, Cambodia. He is the head of the family and works as a sculptor designing and making Buddha statues and historical statues from cement and will then sell up for a profit. From his business activity he can … Read More moderately make $3 a day of income. Moreover, his wife, Lay Sarorn has a business at home washing motor-bikes and vehicles and makes $3 a day of income.

Yous Ba Try would like to ask for a loan from Kiva to purchase more cement to expand his business. Half of the loan will be used to fix a roof of the building where his wife has her business.

Congratulations Kiva on your great year. To date Kiva has facilitated over $54 million in micro loans to entrepreneurs in the developing world.

For more about Kiva’s outstanding year, see the Kiva year end review blog post.

Another Gift Certificate Give Away:
I’ll be giving away another gift certificate via Twiter. I am certain that Kiva will have more loans to fund shortly.

Loanio has continued to claim be almost available since I started blogging on P2P lending. Loanio in fact has been promising its imminent release since before I started blogging P2P lending — back in November of 2008.

For about the past year (maybe more), Loanio has been requesting you to sign up for their email announcements to stay informed of their launch. It is likely that Lending Clubs SEC troubles have impacted Loanio and caused a delay, but why do they keep announcing they will be launching soon? Launch and then announce if you don’t know when you are launching.

Loanio has announced their own launch via email and announced the Read the rest of this entry »

The next p2p lending carnival will be hosted here at Personal Loan Portfolio. There are not a large number of submissions that have been received to date, so you have a great chance of being prominently featured in the carnival. If you have recently written about Lending Club, Prosper Marketplace, Fynanz, or other P2P lending services, consider submitting your article.

To submit an article, go to Read the rest of this entry »

P2P Lending has been in the mainstream media news a great deal lately. I decided to post a roundup of many of the recent news articles on Prosper.com, Lending Club, Zopa, GlobeFunder, and Virgin Money. It is unfortunate that Lending Club entered a quiet period just as they were gaining tremendous growth in loan volume.

CNBC February 5th, 2008: From Zero to Millions: Financing Your New Business:

Online Family Lending Use a lending network designed for inter-family loans, such as CircleLending.com. Tools at that site will help you and your relative come to terms on the length of the loan and the interest rate, and calculate the monthly payment amount. For $99, CircleLending issues a legally binding promissory note and a repayment schedule. For $9 per payment, the company will set up automatic repayments using electronic funds transfer.

Peer-to-peer Lending: Several websites now make it much easier to find an investor who will back your business. Check out prosper.com, lendingclub.com and zopa.com.

Lending Club’s founder financed his first company with personal loans and high-interest credit cards. He eventually sold the business to Oracle. That experience inspired his new company. Lending Club, which launched on Facebook in May 2007 and on its own site last September, uses technology to match borrowers to lenders willing to offer unsecured loans of $500 to $25,000 with three-year, fully amortizing terms.

The author, Laura Rowley, must have used some old notes because Read the rest of this entry »

I have already commented on Lending Club’s quiet period and referral program suspension. I decided to check other blogs to see what they have to say on the email notice that went out today. Since I was reading everything anyway, I decided to post links and a few quotes to everything that I could find using Google’s Blog Search for Lending Club.

Peer-Lend commented on the uncertainty of the meaning of the communication:

There has been a large amount of speculation recently in many corners that the P2P Lending models might be subject to some legal uncertainty regarding whether the loans should be classified as securities… The speculation has primarily been concerned with who, in fact, owns the loans (notes), and how exactly that ownership [is transferred]….

It is unclear whether LendingClub has ceased operations as a result of an SEC action or whether LendingClub has chosen to bite the bullet and submit to regulation voluntarily. This event could have major repercussions…

The g-spot posted:

My guess is their legal team is Read the rest of this entry »

Due to the Lending Club quiet period, the Lending Club referral program has ended. The program was a good one — I earned over $300 in referral fees through this website by blogging about my experience creating a portfolio, creating a video, gathering advice for new lenders, the inception of the referral program and the Lending Club bonus program.

I hope that they bring back the referral program after the quiet period is over.

From the quiet period email sent out today:

Q2. What about referrals?
A2.1 The current referral program is terminated. If you have referred someone who has already signed up as a lender or a borrower, or if you have been referred by someone and have already signed up as a lender or a borrower, you will be receiving your referral payment within the next few days.

Technorati Tags: lending club, peer lending, p2p lending, affiliate programs, referral code

Photo credit: TheTim

Lending Club sent an email today that first surprised me because a quick reading of a few details sound rather ominous. However, if you read past the “you can withdraw uncommitted funds” sections of the email, or rather stick to the important stuff in the first paragraph, this email exciting news for P2P lending.

I believe that this means that Lending Club is going to succeed at making a secondary market for loans. If this works, Read the rest of this entry »

It was my turn to give a speech last Thursday in the Toastmaster’s club that I attend. I decided to give the speech on P2P lending. For me, the most difficult part of selecting this topic was cutting down the material into only a 7 minute speech.

The Toastmaster (the person running the meeting) gives a short for the speaker, but the content is often provided by the speaker. I asked the Toastmaster to mention that this a perfect topic for me because it intersects two of my favorite topics — finance and the internet.

During the speech, I explained the basics of Read the rest of this entry »