| By Jim Bruene on March 25, 2008 11:39 PM | Comments (7) |
Looking at February's Compete data, estimated traffic (see comment 3) at the three major U.S. person-to-person lenders grew by approximately 100,000 unique users compared to January, a 16% gain. Prosper still dominates the category with nearly 10 times as many unique visitors as its nearest rival, Lending Club.
Update: In terms of funded loans, Prosper had double the volume of Lending Club in February: $6.0 million vs. $2.9 million. In January, the volume was $7.2 million vs. $2.8 million.
| Lender | Launch | Feb. 2008 | Jan. 2008 | Mo. Growth | % Growth | Feb. 2007 |
| Prosper | Feb '06 | 650,000 | 570,000 | +80,000 | 14% | 650,000 |
| Lending Club | May '07 | 70,000 | 50,000 | +20,000 | 40% | * |
| Zopa.com | Dec '07 | 16,000 | 14,000 | +2,000 | 14% | * |
| Total | 740,000 | 630,000 | +100,000 | 16% | 650,000 |
Source: Compete.com, estimated unique site visitors during Feb. 2008 *Not launched
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Unlike with other web service I don't think traffic is an important metric for comparing p2p lending services.
After all there are complete loan volume and performance figures to compare the services.
@Claus
Agreed, sales/profits are the ultimate measure of success. Still, traffic is interesting as an indicator of popularity and potential.
Hoowee, Jim, these numbers are orders of magnitudes off for Zopa, both in terms of trends and absolutes. (I think that's why Compete itself describes them as "rough estimates").
Been through this many times, even with Media Metrix. Just tough to get accurate third party counts, particularly for young companies. Main thing is to provide the requisite grain of salt!
See you at BCB?
@Wade
Good point...third-party traffic numbers are very rough estimates.
We'd love to update the post with your internal metrics if you'd be willing to share.
The traffic of the P2P lenders is absolutely negligible vs. the bank's, and to spotlight the P2P lenders' traffic borders on the absurd. The Top 5 banks alone had more than 65 million (that's MILLION, Jim) unique visitors in February. Each of them have added more than 1 million visitors in the last year, or about 8.5 million among them. Citi alone added about 2.5 million uniques to citibank.com over the last year. And you make a big deal about 650,000?!?
@hh
Thanks for showing the bigger picture around traffic numbers. Prosper traffic is just rounding error compared to a big-5 bank.
But 500,000 uniques is still pretty strong for a startup financial with minimal advertising. There's a lot of companies, including about 10,000 financial institutions outside the top-100, who'd love to have that much traffic.
I agree that traffic numbers are meaningless. Loan volumes and profits are the only measures that will determine if these firms survive.
The real business volumes for these p2p services are pretty small for being around for a while now. Zopa USA's model is especially questionable with the paltry return to personal lenders.
Jim: do you think that these p2p lenders will ever gain critical mass and can you make an argument why Zopa USA's model makes sense for anyone other than Zopa?