Online Mortgage Advertising - Is it in trouble?

A Financial Times report cited the downturn as affecting two of Nielsen//NetRating's top ten largest online advertisers: lenders Countrywide and Low Rate Source.

Financial advertising has long represented a lucrative market for paid search and display ads online. A downturn in that spending has been affecting Yahoo since 2006.

Google is still flurishing in mortgage advertising revenue even as fewer companies are competting for search results. Hal Varian - Google's chief economist said the company's $10 billion annual online advertising business is flourishing een as turmoil in credit markets curbs corporate and consumer spending.

Google appears to be less vulnerable because companies will spend more on ads that can be targeted to specific consumers according to a recent article in FORBES. Mortgage Market Meltdown And Online Advertising

On aol.com this week, the Internet-based loan company Lending Tree offered "bad credit options" and a $425,000 loan for only $1,376 a month. Countrywide Financial Corp., the largest US lender, declared "Bad Credit? Call Today. Refinance or Tap into Your Home's Equity" in an online ad from its Full Spectrum Lending Division.

While Forbes is concerned about online advertising for mortgage companies - JP Morgan Chase unveiled a new advertising campain to draww attention to its deposit products, raising yields on certificates of deposit by about one-quarter percentage point on average.

Little Western National Bank, with two Valley offices, was among the first locally to announce special financing help to mortgage applicants who found their homebuying goals frozen when lenders such as Tucson's First Magnus Financial shut down. Western National freed up $50 million in special short-term financing for Arizonans stuck in other lenders' pipelines.

As for online advertisers - beware when searching for a mortgage. Consumer Reports says when it comes to too-good-to-be-true mortgages, the real deal is often quite different. For example, an ad that promises a $510,000 mortgage for under $1,498 a month. If you look at the fine print, you see that if you pay just $1,498 a month you would never pay off the loan because you are only paying about half the interest and none of the principal. To actually pay it off in 30 years, you would have to pay about $3,200 a month.