Porn leaves a bad taste for Ning

Category: Technology Author : Duncan Riley Posted: December 2, 2008
Tags : Gina Bianchini, Marc Andreessen, ning, ning porn
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Porn leaves a bad taste for Ning

White label social network site provider Ning has decided to ban porn focused social networks from January 1.

Ning’s Gina Bianchini said in a post to the Ning blog that the porn sites had a number of issues, including low take up of premium options (so they aren’t paying their way), issues with DMCA notices and related issues with selling advertising. Bianchini also said that having legal porn was encouraging illegal porn on Ning as well.

In some ways its always been a little strange that a funded serious Valley company headed by Marc Andreessen (Netscape and others) also hosted some of the biggest porn social networking sites as well. Not that there’s anything wrong with porn, but it’s something most tech firms usually avoid. The cost though of the decision will be interesting: Ning may claim its not worth while them hosting these sites, but a quick glance at Ning’s stats show porn related sites scattered in the top ten most popular social networks on Ning, and not having those there must mean a hit at some level to Ning’s traffic numbers.

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alice 1 month ago 1 point
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Wait a minute here, I have a site on Ning that deals with adult lifestyles and education and I have paid Ning each month to host my site from the moment that I created my site. They have all of my content and data and block us from getting our code. We have worked long hours to bring out honest truth about different types of adult lifestyles. We were there for ning when they started and now we are getting a bad rap. Its the adult web sites on Ning that kept it going now that they raised Million of dollars they are trying to clean up there act. .
Gina from Ning give us a wonderful Xmas present ... We have on site any more and no were to go. Not all adults site on Ning are porn but were all going ... what will we start burning books again?
This is what was sent back to me when I asked about my content. You tell me if you think this is fair 30 days to find a new home and will they give us back our content and how will we be able to intergrate it on another sever? Ning was not free we paid to put our sites there and they welcome all of our adults sites with open arms and now what we got was 30 days and get out without any of our content.. Is this fair????

E-mail back from Ning
December 3, 2008
[The Ning Team - 12/02/2008 06:24 PM]

Regardless of the services you have purchased, if your network is of an adult
nature it will be removed on January 1st, 2009. If you'd like to keep your
network running on the Ning Platform, you're welcome to make changes so your
network no longer falls into our definition of adult network. This includes
removing any and all adult content from your network.
An adult network includes, but isn’t limited to:
• Pornography
• Depictions of sexual acts
• Sexually explicit or obscene themes

These changes take effect on January 1, 2009, so you'll need to make these
changes before then.

Please let us know if you have any further questions.

Best,
The Ning Team

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Spencer Forman 1 month ago 1 point
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In response to Ning's claim that they are "working now on figuring out a way to ensure that all Adult content is available for export before (all adult sites are turned off on) January 1st", we have the following solution:

http://www.widgetlaboratory.com/members/profile...

WidgetLaboratory is very familiar with Ning's method of "dealing" with customer relationships by way of obfuscation and finger-pointing. The truth behind the words is often hard to find.

Any reasonable person should ask the question: If we could do this from outside of Ning, in such a short time.. how hard could it really be for Ning to deliver a full migration tool to Network Creators BEFORE they are deleted from Ning?

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http://WidgetLaboratory.com