Prosper Can’t Even Cash In on Porn Star
It started off innocently enough with a post on the Prosper blog entitled “All sorts of people looking for loans on Prosper.com“, featuring alongside a police officer and a desk jockey, a borrower wanting to buy a camcorder to “expand further in the adult entertainment industry”. I’m sorry… a what? Really?
Well, apparently, yes, the borrower really is an adult entertainment professional (later shortened to “porn star” in a followup post), and she really was requesting a second loan from Prosper. Her first loan for a candy vending business back in April 2008, can be found here.
So Prosper, newly relaunched under SEC oversight, and eager for a followup to their Twitter contest, jumped at the opportunity. We hooked a porn star! the all-porn star post seemed to shout. Authored under the pseudonym “Prosper Pink” (complete with Twitter account and Facebook page), Prosper tackled the feminine side of P2P lending, strutting across the wide line that separates financial services from pornography, and wondering aloud why they couldn’t get a little “financially sassy”.
Well, it turns out that attitude and sass can only get you so far in the world of social lending. Even though Prosper has already been compared to financial porn, and even though Prosper’s minimum bid of $25 gives you thirty six hot months of interest from Nina Jaymes (the same as a mere month of access to her web site), the 14-day listing only got to 52% funded. Not surprisingly, the cop and the desk worker both got fully funded within days.
So what’s the moral of the story? Just because you have double D’s doesn’t mean Prosper won’t give you an E rating. If your credit score is between 660 and 680, you have to offer more to lenders than a 9% estimated return (after 14% estimated loss and 1% fees). And if you’re hoping to attract serious investors to your peer-to-peer lending site, focus on borrowers with real assets, not big assets.
Photo credit: NinaJaymes.com
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