Payday Loan Traffic Demographics, Personal Money Store

Baseless Payday Loan Assertion

There is a prevailing image in the media that payday loan companies target minority and poor consumers. It is a convenient tactic used to portray payday loan businesses as predators that are concerned only with profit, at the expense of ensnaring hapless consumers in a “cycle of debt.”

This type of sensationalistic propaganda is easy to find, but the assertions are baseless. There simply isn’t compelling data to support that payday loans are in any way targeted toward minorities or the poor.

The truth is out there

Using powerful online demographic analysis tools like those available from Quantcast.com, it’s easy to see exactly what kind of traffic the Web site PersonalMoneyStore attracts. As you’ll see, the facts do not support claims that payday loan companies are targeting poor or minority groups.

Metric one: Male vs. Female

According to Quantcast’s measurement, traffic to PersonalMoneyStore.com is 57 percent male, 43 percent female. Represented in terms of an online index, these numbers tell a different story.

But first, what is an online index? Quantcast defines it as follows:

A measure of how a given metric compares to an average, such as the average U.S. internet user. If a site indexes 100 in college graduates, that means a given visitor to it is as likely to be a college graduate as any U.S. internet user chosen at random. An index of 200 means the visitor is twice as likely to be a college graduate, 50 means half as likely, and so on. The higher the index, the better the site is at attracting that type of audience. Note that a high index does not necessarily mean a high percentage in an absolute sense. For example, approximately 5% of internet users in the U.S. are Asian. A site with an Asian index of 400 would have an audience four times richer than average in Asians, but Asians would still only constitute one visitor in five.

With this is mind, Quantcast’s analysis of traffic to PersonalMoneyStore.com is more likely than average to draw male consumer traffic, while female traffic is close to average but slightly below. Perhaps this supports a popular belief that women tend to think more about having something set aside for a rainy day, while men on average tend to live more in the moment, dealing with problems as they occur. There are few studies that support this notion specifically, but a recent University of Virginia study (http://artsandsciences.virginia.edu/kipps/documents/PIPHowWomenAndMenUseNet.pdf) regarding male and female Internet usage indicates that women are more likely than men to cite reasons for not using the Internet, with the predominant reasons being that they “don’t need it” (58 percent of women surveyed, compared with 45 of men) or “don’t want it” (58 vs. 43 percent). Perhaps this helps describe the larger percentage of males who use PersonalMoneyStore.com.

Metric two: Age

Regarding the dominant age for users of the Web site, 41 percent of users are age 50 or older, followed closely by 35-49 at 39 percent. Both of these figures are well above average Internet index figures (176 for 50 and older, 144 for 35-49). Fifteen percent of traffic is from users aged 18-34, while the remainder constitutes six percent of traffic. Perhaps the reason for this lopsided figure toward the older end of the spectrum is that more mature users tend to have more disposable income and know how to handle their money responsibly.

Metric three: Income

This leads us to the income breakdown. More than half of all traffic to PersonalMoneyStore.com (56 percent) earns $60,000 or more per year, which includes an above average number of users who earn $100,000-plus per year. This seems to contradict claims that no fax payday loan online portals are targeting the poor. Specifically, 28 percent each come from the $100,000-plus and $60,000-$100,000 groups, while 27 percent earn $30,000-$60,000 per year. It seems clear that PersonalMoneyStore.com users, if we are to take them as a reasonable representative sample of traffic experienced by online payday loan portals, does not target users you cannot repay their debts.

Metric four: Education

Increased earning potential and education go hand in hand. Recent U.S. Government studies show a clear correlation between a worker’s level of education and average pay level. The higher the level of education attained, the higher the pay level on average. With this is mind, let’s look at Quantcast’s analysis of PersonalMoneyStore traffic to see if it is “exploiting the uneducated.” Sixty-four percent of users have either graduated college (44 percent) or graduate school (20 percent), the latter being well above the Internet index average.

What about minority exploitation?

The data also fails to support this spurious claim. PersonalMoneyStore.com traffic is 82 percent Caucasian and 11 percent African-American. Both figures are above the Internet index average, the latter significantly so (142).

Do payday loans target families who are overstretched?

This is another area where Quantcast dispels a myth. A whopping 80 percent of PersonalMoneyStore.com traffic has no children between the ages of 6 and 17. According to the 2000 Census, the largest percentage of American families were those who were married without children (28.7 percent), and the trend of fewer overall children per family has been increasing since the 1970s. Thus, exploitation of families with children by payday loan companies seems unlikely.