This holiday season Prosper has a little something for everyone. There are three giveaways going on right now.
1. A Free iPad2 For New P2P Investors
Prosper ran a similar promotion back in June and now it is back again for the holidays. If you open a new account and invest $25,000 Prosper will give you a free iPad2 (a $599 value). There are other gifts for investors that don’t have that kind of money to open an account. For a $10,000 investment you get some Bose headphones and for $5,000 you get an iPod Nano. To take advantage of these offers visit this special page (this is an affiliate link). This offer expires on December 12th, 2011.
2. A Free iPod for New Borrowers
New borrowers who sign up for a new loan this long weekend can qualify to receive a free iPod. But for this one you have to be quick. This offer ends on Sunday, November 27th. Here is the special page (affiliate link) to take advantage of this offer.
3. A $5,000 Sweepstakes Giveaway
This one is open to everyone. You don’t have to have an account at Prosper and it is open to residents in all 50 U.S. states. Prosper is giving away $5,000 to one lucky person. All you have to do is give them your name and email address. Here is the sign-up page for the sweepstakes, this one ends November 30th. And good luck!
So Prosper is certainly in a giving spirit this Thanksgiving. Obviously with the expectation that it will drive an increase in volume for their business. I hope you can take advantage of one or more of these offers.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank every reader of this blog. I really appreciate your continued participation in the p2p lending community. And I wish you a Happy Thanksgiving.
I think they should also give out 2 additional $5000 cash prizes. One to the investor with the highest official annual return number & one to the investor with the lowest annual return number. Because I’m pretty sure I’m in the running for this. Gregg are you reading this? 🙂
Dan – A prize for the highest annual return is a good idea and that idea has actually come up in meetings. Thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately, I doubt we would be rewarding the lowest return, and if we did we would have to count profits made from selling notes on Folio, which might make you more likely to compete in the highest category. 😉
Glenn……….I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to insist that we use “official figures”. I just can’t bear the thought of putting you guys through any extra work when you already have such a wonderful & accurate system in place. 🙂
@Dan/@Glenn, I love the idea of rewarding the top investor, I think that would be really cool and some great PR. Of course, I would like to see it include Folio numbers and it needs to have at least a 12 month minimum for account age. But it would be interesting to see that.
Then you could even start a Covestor type system where people could follow what loans this investor is choosing. Lots of possibilities.
Peter
You hit on something there…. A LC or P “mutual fund”.
The PIMCO of P2P lending. lol
(I know you had a guest poster a while bag that was doing this with out being registered…)
I like the rewards system. Adds some fun to the investing. New customers are always much tougher to get then keeping existing customers. I do enjoy the cashback rewards when I can find a worthy featured loan to invest in. That said, I wonder if prosper would consider some fun prizes for investing in featured loans. Say giveaway x number of prizes to anyone who invests $ in featured loans.
Obviously the bottom line would matter and the promotion would have to attract more money, but 1 prize entry per $25 invested could be a way to get existing customers to contribute more and reward the larger investors. Just some ideas.
Jason
@Charlie, The idea of a p2p lending mutual fund is certainly something I have thought about but it would be fraught with regulatory issues. The idea I was putting forward in my last comment is the idea of following certain investors. This would apply to Prosper more than Lending Club because this information is publicly available. You could create a service where you could find out exactly what loans any investor is choosing and get emailed daily on what these choices are – you could even have links to the loans on Prosper. It is just a thought but something that could have potential one day.
@Bilgefisher, Prosper has shown some interest in rewarding investors in creative ways so maybe they might want to expand on this one day. The ideas are endless when it comes to a reward system. But something fun that encourages investors to put more money in loans would be a win-win I think.