Social Networking Watch: News on the Social Networking and Social Media Industry

Glam Buys Ning for $150 Million

TECH CRUNCH - Sep 21 - Ning has finally found a home. Glam Media is buying the network of social networks. A source puts the deal price higher, at $150 million. Ning’s co-founder, chairman, and original investor Marc Andreessen will be joining Glam’s board as part of the deal.

by Erick Schonfeld
See full article at Tech Crunch

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Ning: Charging Users Works For Us

WSJ - Apr 14 - A year ago this month, social-networking start-up Ning decided to phase out free accounts. The company had been hoping that 9,000 of its 285,000 free account-holders would agree to pay for the service. Instead, more than 50,000 made the shift. Ning, which was founded in 2004, helps people set up social-networking-style sites that include things like blogs, comments and video uploads.

by Jennifer Valentino-DeVries
See full article at WSJ

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Ning Gets Its Groupon On

TECH CRUNCH - Oct 21 - Groupon and Ning are launching an affiliate beta program today. Anyone who runs a Ning social network can now add a Groupon widget with geo-targeted daily deals. They will get a cut of any Groupon deals purchased through their Ning sites, and Groupon will extend its reach potentially to tens of thousands of new sites with strong communities who perhaps would like to start buying things together. The program is in limited beta now, and will be rolled out as an option for all Ning sites by early next year. Besides Ning, Groupon may soon strike similar deals with Yahoo, eBay and Citysearch. FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH

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Ning Gets Users To Pay For Service

BLOOMBERG - Aug 12 - Ning did what many young Web companies only dream of: It got customers weaned on free services to start paying. Since telling users in April it would stop offering the means to build and operate social networks for free, Ning’s paid user base tripled to 45,000, with memberships starting at $2.95 a month. The closely held company is adding paying subscribers at 5,000 a month, three times the rate it had before. Founded in 2004, the same year as Facebook, Ning failed to turn a profit from its original strategy: offering most services for free and charging a monthly fee for extra features. FULL ARTICLE @ BLOOMBERG

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Mercury News Interview: Gina Bianchini, Entrepreneur, Founder Of Ning

MERCURY NEWS - July 16 - While Ning goes through its own turmoil — though traffic is still growing, former COO and now CEO Jason Rosenthal sharply cut staff and killed its free service — Bianchini's working as an "entrepreneur-in-residence" at Andreessen's venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, and keeping her personal plans to herself. 

Q: What was the original idea behind Ning?
A: We had a very simple premise. What if we gave people an opportunity to create their own rich, immersive, branding experience that would bring people together around their passion? Just as in the early days of the Web, when people looked around for diverse online experiences, we believed that same thing would happen with social technology.

Q: But doesn't Facebook provide the same thing as Ning?
A: On Facebook, you can't create in 30 seconds that same immersive social experience that Ning offers.

Q: So why did you leave?
A: It was time. I handed it over to our great COO, Jason. 

Q: You've succeeded in an industry that still suffers from a paucity of high-level female entrepreneurs. Do you see that changing in the future?
A: The last two years have seen the mainstreaming of the Internet, especially with social networking and social commerce. What this means is that women — who currently control 80+% of household spending — are bringing their time, energy and purchasing power to the Internet in fundamentally new ways. 

Q: Where is social networking today?
A: Never before have we seen the intersection of technology, psychology and organizational dynamics as we're seeing in 2010.

Q: So where will it all take us in the next year or two?
A: We'll soon see a number of emerging social technologies. The first five years of social networking were about building the infrastructure. It was like, "Build it, and the revenues will come." But now it's about applications And all of them have immediate revenue opportunities.''

Q: What about privacy concerns?
A: It's about finding the right levels and points where people are comfortable. Culturally, people are getting more comfortable sharing more, but "more" is a relative thing.

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Ning: We Have A $4 Billion Market Opportunity

MASHABLE - May 4 - It’s official: Ning has announced that it’s going premium. Ning will now offer three products: Ning Pro, Ning Plus and Ning Mini. The Pro version, which will bundle all of Ning’s premium features and adds premium customer support, will cost $49.95 per month. The Plus version, which offers personal branding, unlimited members and some of Pro’s other features, will cost $19.95 per month. Finally, Ning mini, which is meant for small groups, non-profits and educational institutions, will retail for $2.95/month. Ning CEO Jason Rosenthal believes that the social network creation market is a $4 billion market opportunity, based on the company’s research and estimates. To capture that market, though, it is “doubling down” on its premium products, which means the dissolution of the free versions. FULL ARTICLE @ MASHABLE

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Grou.ps And Grouply Welcome Ning Refugees

TECH CRUNCH - Apr 16 - With the news of Ning’s move to eliminate free social networks on its platform, competitors are rushing to emphasize their free offerings for building a social network. Today, Grouply, a startup that’s built around creating and managing online groups from Google and Yahoo Groups, is going to try to make it easy for Ning users to port their groups to Grouply’s platform. And fellow competitor Grou.ps is also welcoming Ning refugees to its free social network platform as well. Grou.ps also provides a similar platform to Ning. The startup’s networks are attractive to users because it lets you run all of your group’s collaboration tools from one GROU.PS domain using a single login. The number of Ning networks that migrate may not be too significant; 75% of Ning’s traffic already comes from premium accounts. FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH

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Ning Cuts 40% Of Staff

TECH CRUNCH - Apr 15 - Ning is killing off its free product, forcing existing free networks to either make the change to premium accounts or migrate their networks elsewhere. Also the company has cut ~70 people — over 40% of its staff. Currently, Ning’s premium options include support (which has a $10/month and $100/month options for different service levels); Custom domains ($5 a month); Extra storage and bandwidth ($10 a month); Ad removal ($25 a month) and the ability to hide any trace that you’re running on Ning ($25 a month). FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH

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This post also appears at the SNC Forums.

Ning CEO Gina Bianchini Insists Facebook Isn’t A Competitor

TECH CRUNCH - Feb 3 - Gina Bianchini is the CEO of Ning. There are 41M registered users on Ning, and Gina says that 92M people a month worldwide visit Ning sites. Anyone can easily create a Ning social network, cobranded or white labelled. 2.5M of them have been created so far. In some ways Ning networks are competitive to Facebook Pages. Gina doesn’t see it this way. She notes that Facebook pages have limited features and are locked within Facebook itself. Ning allows for deep social experiences around brands and things. FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH

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Virtual Goods Give Web Firms New Revenue In Ad Slump

REUTERS - Dec 30 -  90% of new online game start-ups sell virtual goods, estimates Jeremy Liew, managing director at Lightspeed Venture Partners. In November, video game publisher Electronic Arts paid $275M for Playfish, which makes games for social networks such as Facebook, which sell virtual goods. A month later, a group of investors poured $180M into Zynga, another social networking game company. Virtual goods account for 90% of Zynga's revenue. For social networks like Ning, which introduced virtual goods in October, digital wares will remain one of several revenue-generating businesses, including ads and premium services, said COO Jason Rosenthal. Ning will introduce new types of virtual goods in 2010 that could double as promotional coupons, allowing the recipient of a virtual handbag, for example, to get a discount or a bonus item in the real world. FULL ARTICLE @ REUTERS

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Ning Expands Executive Team, Continue Record Growth

MARKETWIRE - Nov 12 - Social network platform, Ning, has achieved annual growth of over 300% with 1.7 million networks created and 37 million registered users. 1 million new users sign up every 12 days. In order to support this growth, Ning has initiated an extensive round of promotions and new hires from the likes of Amazon, eBay, MySpace, Yahoo! And YouTube. FULL ARTICLE @ MARKETWIRE

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Ning Continues Impressive Growth, Announces App Contest

TECH CRUNCH – Nov 5 – Ning's COO, Jason Rosenthal, announced that the company has reached an impressive milestone of 37 million users and 1.6 million social networks using its platform. Growth continues at the rate of one million users every two weeks. 20% of these networks are running at least one Ning app, while the average is two. That's an audience of over 9 million users. To encourage app development, Ning has launched the Ning Appathon contest with a top prize of $5000. FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH

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Ning Launches Virtual Gifts

TECH CRUNCH - Oct 20 - Ning, the platform that lets users build their own social networks, is launching a new feature called Ning Virtual Gifts, bringing a built-in virtual goods store to the site’s 1.6M networks. Ning is letting Network Creators choose from a library of pre-made virtual gifts, but they’re also free to create their own. Ning will be taking a hefty chunk of the revenue from each gift: after PayPal’s processing fees, half will go to Ning, and the other half will go to the network creator who sold the gift. FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH

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Ning Adds Appplications To Its Plattform

PC WORLD -- Sep 11 -- Ning, which offers a platform for creating a customized social network, is now offering apps for users' sites.  Ning is encouraging third-party developers to contribute. Ning must approve apps that go into its App Directory to ensure they comply with its terms of service. FULL ARTICLE @ PC WORLD

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Niche Social Sites Seek Growth Under Facebook's Shadow

REUTERS -- July 28 -- Ning.com, which allows users to build their own social networks, has shown triple-digit growth and notched up a few million users very quickly. "There will always be a place for niche sites that have a focus", Gartner analyst Ray Valdes said, though he added that does not see them becoming as big as Facebook. "The promise of niche social networks and social networking apps is a more targeted audience around a specific interest that will be extremely attractive to advertisers," IDC analyst Caroline Dangson said. But advertisers go where users are, and it is no easy task to amass an audience. So some Internet startups have chosen to become an app provider rather than try build a site. App maker Slide had an audience of 32M in the U.S. in June; Rock You had 26M according to comScore. Zynga provides social gaming applications. The three have a strong presence on Facebook. FULL ARTICLE @ REUTERS

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Ning Raises Another $15 Million

TECH CRUNCH -- July 21 -- Do-it-yourself social network Ning has added another $15M to its coffers from LightSpeed Venture Partners. This brings the total capital raised to $119M. Earlier this year, Ning passed one million social networks created, but the key is how many of those are active and how many people they attract. In the U.S., unique visitors declined 10% from May, 2009 to June, 2009, according to comScore. Ning had 5.1M visitors in the U.S. in June. FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH

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Ning: The Future Of Online Social Networking?

CNN -- May 25 -- Ning lets members custom build their own social-networking platforms based around their passions and pastimes. Ning had 4.7m unique visitors as of January and surpassed 1m social networks. CNN spoke to Ning CEO Gina Bianchini.

Q: What is the mission of Ning?
A: It's a way to get people to organize and get people to meet around their passions.

Q: Did any specific Web sites or companies inspire you to create Ning?
A: We were really inspired by the first wave of Internet companies truly native to the Web like Craigslist and eBay.

Q: What are some of the interesting social networks on Ning?
A: There are 200,000 active social networks right now. There is a network called 'This is 50.' It's like a hip hop TMZ. Another is the 'Pickens' Plan.' It's a way they are organizing more than 200,000 people around wind-energy policy.

Q: What do you attribute to the growth of Ning?
A: What's fundamental in the adoption of Ning is that people are unique. They have unique interest and passion and they like having a contact for that experience and for their identity.

Q: How does your site make money?
A: If you want to add a feature like making your own domain, you can pay al a carte for options. On the free service there are ads contextual to what the network is.

Q: What are your thoughts on the future of social networking?
A: Niche social networking sites are absolutely something people want to do.
FULL ARTICLE @ CNN

Mark Brooks: Ning memberships make sense and are a comparative good deal against the likes of their competition, such as Kickapps.

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The Fastest Growing Social Sites

MASHABLE -- Apr 20 -- According to Nielsen Online, these are some notable developments from March in social networking:

- Ning is currently the 2nd fastest growing social networking property. Its traffic is up 283% YOY, and it now reaches a total of 5.6 million people in the US.
- Bebo has grown 148% in the past year, and now reaches more than 6.1 million people in the US. Bebo is known mostly for being big overseas, so the next few months will tell if this was a one-time pop thanks to AIM integration or a continued trend.
- LinkedIn continues to be one of the quickest growing social sites and has more than doubled its size in the past year. It now reaches better than 15.8 million people in the US, ranking it 3rd in total size behind Facebook and MySpace.

- The “big three” stories remain much the same: Twitter is now growing at a mind-boggling 2,565% and reached more than 13 million people in the US during March. Facebook saw 69.1 million visitors in March and continues to extend its lead over MySpace, which saw only 55.9 million.

FULL ARTICLE @ MASHABLE 

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