Putting 40 loans up the popularity list would defeat the project,...
I was thinking that 40 different basketed amounts of $25 of the
same loan might be more effective than a single basketed amount of $1000.
But I'm still suspicious that the "popularity" is determined simply by the time since the last action on the loan (e.g. time loan posted on site, time that an amount was put into a basket [perhaps], time an amount was checked out) - so if there were 40 different actions then it wouldn't affect matters anyway - only the
last action's time would affect the popularity rankings. And again, the
amount placed into the basket / checked out wouldn't affect the ranking.
(The only thing that makes me suspect that the time is the criteria affecting "popularity" is that one of the API calls that can be made is to obtain the "newest" loans, which is the equivalent as far as I can tell of what the website refers to as "popularity" - but there is no definition [as far as I know] as to how the API determines what it classes as "newest".)