A Fistful Of Dollars: The Story of a Kiva.org Loan from Kieran Ball.
The video was made by Kiva fellow (volunteer) Kieran Ball, who worked for Kiva in Cambodia. It explains the transfer of the money for a Kiva loan from a lender in London to a borrower in Cambodia.
This is a great example how many people can be reached over the internet with a well made video in a short time. Online since only 8 days the video has been watched over 32,000 times and was embedded in many websites (at least 50).
Kiva today has reached the milestone of 50 million US$, doubling the loan volume in the last 8 months. I have been lending on Kiva for nearly 2 years now and so far all of my borrowers have repaid me (unlike my MyC4 borrowers). Kiva is doing a very good job in keeping defaults low.
1 loan every 32 seconds
The current – impressive – statistics for Kiva are:
| Total value of all loans made through Kiva: | $50,023,035 |
| Number of Kiva Lenders: | 363,222 |
| Number of loans that have been funded through Kiva: | 70,357 |
| Percentage of Kiva loans which have been made to women entrepreneurs: | 77.96% |
| Number of Kiva Field Partners (microfinance institutions Kiva partners with): | 93 |
| Number of countries Kiva Field Partners are located in: | 42 |
| Current repayment rate (all partners): | 98.76% |
| Current default rate (all partners): | 1.24% |
| Average size of loan for funding: | $449.02 |
| Average total amount loaned per Kiva Lender (includes reloaned funds): | $137.81 |
| Average number of loans per Kiva Lender: | 3.70 |
The growth is stimulated by a large, active supporter base, that comes up with creative marketing ideas. Did you know that you can build a beard to support Kiva?
The German domain name kredit.de was sold today for 892,000 Euro (approx 1.14 million US$). ‘Kredit’ is the german word for ‘loan’, a very valuable keyword in targeting consumers seeking loans online.
The domain was bought by Unister GmbH from the Abacho AG. It is the highest price ever for a domain sale of the country top level domain .de. Previous examples of .de-domain sales for high prices were chat.de for 320,000 Euro or arbeitsmarkt.de for 200,000 Euro.
Abacho AG still owns the domain kredit.com and said it plans to sell that domain through Sedo, too.
(Source: p2p-kredite.com)
If you sign up at Loanio.com as a new lender using this link, the peer to peer lending service Loanio will credit you $25. This promotion may be time-limited, so sign-up now, even if you want to start lending later.
German p2p lending service Smava has sent its lenders an email asking them to produce short videos telling their personal experiences using Smava. Smava offers 50 Euro (approx. 75 US$) for each user generated video that is sent to Smava and published.
Three (older) videos by Smava lenders can be viewed here.
Kiva did billboard advertising on highway 101. Apparently the ad was sponsored by Paypal.
Matt Flannery of Kiva speculates whether the board brings 125 additional visits per day to the website (0.04% conversion rate) or if user growth on the sampled weeks had other causes.
