The social networking phenomena has left financial services mostly behind. Aside from a few banner ads here and there (see E*Trade's clever animated ad on MySpace here), financial institutions have stayed away. The risks of a poor brand association have so far outweighed the benefits of putting the bank name in front of millions of younger users. An added problem: Do banks have enough street cred on these sites to make even a small advertising investment pay off?

Wells Fargo is the only major U.S bank to dare try. With four blogs, a MySpace page, an early Second Life presence, and even a placeholder on Twitter, the bank is dipping its toes in social media (see coverage here). 

But not all social networks are about music and dating. Gather.com, the self-proclaimed "leader in social media for adults," boasts 210,000 members across nine channels: books, food, health, movies, music, news, politics, travel, and last but not least, money. The money channel, where I became member number 9,619 yesterday, has member posts in the usual areas: personal finance, investments, real estate, taxes and so on.   

Last month, the company announced strategic advertising partnerships with five companies including Starbucks, Sony and Charles Schwab who implemented an impressive branding of the website's Money channel <money.gather.com> (see screenshot below). 

Analysis
According to Compete, more than 11% of the nation's online time is now logged at MySpace. Let me repeat: across all 200 million or so U.S. Internet users, more than 11% of the time is spent at MySpace. In terms of pageviews, it's even more dramatic, with the site accounting for 16% of all pageviews in December.

That level of usage is astounding. It's more than the combined total of eBay, Amazon, Google, MSN, AOL, and YouTube. Only Yahoo has anything close, with just under 9% share of time online. The only financial company cracking the top-20 was Bank of America, number 15 with 0.34% (see the full table at Compete's blog here).

Top 5 Websites in Attention
% of total time spent online in United States (Jan 2007)

1. 11.3 % myspace.com  
2. 8.6% yahoo.com   
3. 3.5% ebay.com
4. 3.4% msn.com
5. 2.1% google.com

Source: Compete.com, Feb. 2007

There is no way that advertisers will ignore this much traffic. Financial institutions will eventually jump into social media sponsorships, especially as specialized areas are developed, such as Gather's Money channel. Advertising dollars follow the eyeballs so long as there is a viable advertising platform. And you can bet the large media companies that own the social networks will make sure they "monetize" the attention as effectively as possible.  

Schwab "owns" the main Money page at Gather.com 

Note:

1. For those of you who haven't looked at the company financials recently, Schwab has about 7 million accounts and 300 branches. Here's the details from the press release (here):

The Charles Schwab Corporation (Nasdaq: SCHW) has more than 300 offices and 6.8 million client brokerage accounts, 570,000 corporate retirement plan participants, 149,000 banking accounts, and $1.3 trillion in client assets as of January 31, 2007.