• by Masha Geller , November 5, 2001

It appears that amidst all this talk of a softening economy, a troubling trend has emerged: credit-card companies are aggressively working to increase their customer base and encourage more spending, while credit-counseling services are seeking to reach people trying to get out of debt. The good part is that this is all happening through online ads.

Jupiter Media Metrix today reported that online advertising for consumer credit services increased 93% so far this year, making it the largest online advertising segment within the financial services industry - one of the three industries that advertises the most online.

Credit card companies were responsible for 79% of online advertising this year in the consumer credit segment: Visa was responsible for 59%; MasterCard 15%; Discover/Novus 3% and American Express 2%. The remaining 21% was taken up by various credit counseling and reporting companies such as Neway (8%), ConsumerInfo.com (6%) and PrivacyGuard (2%.)

JMM also says that consumer credit services had the highest number of ad impressions per advertiser for each week this year among all financial services segments. The average consumer credit advertiser had 75.9 million impressions in the first quarter of this year and 146.7 million in the third quarter.

More recently, the segment saw a period of sharp increases - ad impressions increased 75% between the weeks of July 30 and October 15, from 14.4 million to 25.2 million.

Getsmart.com was the leading consumer credit advertiser and also the leading financial advertiser overall in Q3 of 2001 with 5.6 billion total impressions on Yahoo!, iWon and MSN - the top three host sites for financial services ads. According to JMM's data, traffic to Getsmart.com increased 386% as a result. Following Providian was Citigroup with 2.0 billion impressions and Datek with 1.9 billion impressions.