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1

48 (66.7%)

2

11 (15.3%)

3

6 (8.3%)

4

0 (0%)

5 or more

1 (1.4%)

0

6 (8.3%)

Total Members Voted: 70

[sb92075]

Recently, Prosper has seen an explosion in membership growth.

I am not convinced the actual statistics support the statement above.

Code: [Select]

select substring(CreationDate,1,7) , count(*) from Members group by substring(CreationDate,1,7);
+-----------------------------+----------+
| substring(CreationDate,1,7) | count(*) |
+-----------------------------+----------+
| 2005-10                     |       25 |
| 2005-11                     |      166 |
| 2005-12                     |       56 |
| 2006-01                     |       96 |
| 2006-02                     |     3877 |
| 2006-03                     |     8134 |
| 2006-04                     |    14938 |
| 2006-05                     |    12077 |
| 2006-06                     |     8623 |
| 2006-07                     |     9572 |
| 2006-08                     |    13594 |
| 2006-09                     |    13888 |
| 2006-10                     |    21911 |
| 2006-11                     |    20814 |
| 2006-12                     |    19566 |
| 2007-01                     |    21026 |
| 2007-02                     |    48746 |
| 2007-03                     |    41642 |
| 2007-04                     |    36916 |
| 2007-05                     |    34409 |
| 2007-06                     |    33370 |
| 2007-07                     |    40933 |
| 2007-08                     |    33231 |
| 2007-09                     |    31425 |
| 2007-10                     |    38638 |
| 2007-11                     |    37122 |
| 2007-12                     |    34477 |
| 2008-01                     |    40884 |
| 2008-02                     |    15354 |
+-----------------------------+----------+
29 rows in set (2.94 sec)


[traveler505]

It's been a year-long slow-motion explosion.

http://www.lendingstats.com/membershipGrowth

When you look at the top two charts, something obviously changed in February 2007, when the friends and endorsements program started.  Before that, total new registrations per month was roughly double the number of lenders & borrowers.  Now it's about four times.

It seems very likely that most of these unverified identities were added in order to provide endorsements for borrower listings, not due to a desire to lend or borrow.  What we don't know is how many of them were actually created by persons other than the borrower, and how many are sockpuppets.