The Inquisitr » ning

Ning raises $15 million Series E on a $750 million valuation

Duncan Riley — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 01:41:36 +0000

White label social networking site Ning has raised $15 million Series E in a round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners on a book valuation of a neat $750 million.

Kara Swisher broke the news, reporting that Ning would use the money for further growth, although also quoted one of the VC’s saying that the round “was not a traditional fundraising effort, but more of an interest by Ning in adding a top VC to its investor pool and by Lightspeed in Ning’s hyper-growth.”

Ning has been highly successful, powering at a count late last year of over 750,000 social networks; Kara notes that Ning now claims to have 29.3 million registered users. The site is ranked 154 in Alexa and 208 according to Compete, putting it high up among the most popular sites online.

Some are questioning the valuation, but without knowing revenue it’s not a call I’d make. Instead the query is with the investment rate: $119 million over five rounds starting January 2007 is particularly high. Surely at the traffic Ning is pushing through, combined with a decent “premium” paid product offering they’d be profitable by now and the company wouldn’t need further investment. Ning is after all run by people who know how to make decent money from the beginning, unlike Facebook which has struggled for a long time.

Ning

Porn leaves a bad taste for Ning

Duncan Riley — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 05:12:45 +0000

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.

Ning

The Next Social Networks Will Not Be Powered By Blog Platforms

Duncan Riley — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 00:22:35 +0000

Sarah Perez on ReadWriteWeb today argues that the next social networks will be powered By WordPress and Movable Type. She bases her conclusion on the excellent new release of MovableType that delivers a full social networking solution, and Automattic’s Buddypress acquisition for WordPress, a solution that turns WordPress MU into a social networking platform.

The offers from both WordPress (WP) and MovableType (MT) are positive steps forward in the evolution of the self hosted blogging platform, but availability doesn’t equate to takeup. Some social networks in the future may well use MT or WP, but the next wave of social networks will NOT be powered by WordPress and MovableType.

The reason is remarkably simple, and the evidence is already apparent. Time.

Time on two fronts. People are becoming time poor and are finding it harder to split their time between competing services. A new wave of social networks based on WP or MT will only add to the noise, and unless there is a compelling reason to join, most will simply ignore these new networks. The move is on to aggregation, not separation. Then there’s the need to maintain separate logins on each install. There are some OpenID solutions for WP and MT, but they are neither commonly installed nor is OpenID yet commonly used. There appears to be no interoperability between installs like Indenti.ca, so each install will be a walled garden of content, unique to the site, but unable to communicate with other installations.

The second time point is administration. The ability to add guest blogs or forums to blogs has been available in various forms for years, but how many installs do we see? A full blown social network is an administrative nightmare for all but large blogs with a lot of money to throw at staff to take care of that side of the business. And even then, is there a compelling business case to be had in administering these installs? Then there’s the real possibility that these social networks will be spam honey pots. Even in 2008, most still face comment spam, imagine dealing with spam across a full social network.

Of those sites who currently run social networks or even forums, how many are truly successful? Mashable is the only blog I can think of in this space who runs a remotely successful social network, and even then, it’s not exactly a hive of activity. TechCrunch runs a forum that at least while I was there was prone to spam and wasn’t heavily used, at least when considering the traffic of the site itself compared with the activity on the forum.

The Ning Solution

The true success story in the hosted social networking space is Ning. The site has 370,000 social networks as of July, but only manages 3.5 million to 4 million page views per month, or roughly 10 visitors per social network. That traffic aside, the selling case between a local MT or WP install vs Ning is strong. On Ning, your login works across every social network on the site, it is fully hosted so you don’t have to worry as much about spam and abuse, it’s tested, and for the basic service it’s completely free. There are plenty of Ning competitors out there as well, so choice isn’t lacking. You can also pay to map the Ning social network to your own domain and to show ads, so the control argument with a self install is negated some what. If your site did have a compelling case for including a social network (and few statically probably do) I don’t see why you wouldn’t sign up with Ning or a similar service.

Conclusion

I don’t want to sound to be too harsh on either WP or MT for these features being available. They are a positive progression in the evolution of blogging, and no doubt that some will seek to add social networking features to their blogs. However, given these features are in the most part already available both externally and within each site (BuddyPress isn’t new), and similar features such as forums are old school but are not widespread, there will be no rush of MT or WP powered social networks. Nor perhaps should there be.

Ning

Pringo adds Microblogging to White Label Social Networking Mix

Duncan Riley — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 21:00:37 +0000

White label social network provider Pringo has added a micro-blogging service to its mix, a move claimed to be the “first white label social networking platform which allows customers to employ Twitter-like functionality.”

We’ve seen no shortage of new players enter the microblogging space recently as Twitter has ridden the fail whale. I don’t have a lot of details about how the Pringo microblogging service will work, for example will the service be within each social networking site or across Pringo powered sites, but consider the broader implications: if you thought you’ve seen a rush of Twitter clones already, wait till they become a standard add-on to every non-major social networking site. Pringo is a more specialist white label provider, compared to say a service like Ning, that offers social networking sites for everyone, but it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to guess that other players in this space are likely to folow suit.

Pringo client sites include StreetCred, MyCountrySpace, and eHarmony.

Lost Zombies: A Community Generated Zombie Documentary

Duncan Riley — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 02:03:06 +0000

Find more videos like this on Lost Zombies

Lost Zombies is a social network that is setting out to build the first community generated zombie documentary.

The ultimate goal of Lost Zombies is to gather definitive proof that zombies are real and to compile that proof into a feature length documentary film. The site is asking the general public to submit any proof any proof of zombies they may have. Better still, Lost Zombies believes that “as a community we can educate the world’s population of the reality of zombies and the potential, if not imminent, zombie apocalypse.”

The site runs on Ning so includes your average social networking features. If you like Zombies, or have on living in your backyard, you’ll like Lost Zombies.

Pringo Gets Some Ninja Loving

Duncan Riley — Wed, 14 May 2008 09:51:03 +0000

White label social networking networking startup Pringo has partnered with NINJA Mobile to power an application that allows mobile users to view, create, post, and share content from their cell phones on any Web site built on Pringo’s platform.

The joint mobile service allows consumers to choose between low-fee subscription or ad-supported packages, with site owners benefiting from the ability to monetize their Web sites through advertising.

LA based Pringo has been fairly quiet new wise since I last wrote about them back in October 2007. The tech is something like Ning meets Geocities 2.0, with more customization than many in this space. They have an impressive list of partners here.