Ning Surpasses 200,000 Social Networks - But Is It Cash Flow Positive?

Marc Andreessen posts at his blog that Ning has now passed 200,000 social networks using the Ning platform. Ning is a simple to use service that allows you to create a social network site for anything you want. You get user pages, photos, videos, discussions and the rest of the tools commonly used in social networking.

If you’re a podcaster and want a social network for your fan club it’s worth checking out. You can see a great example of Ning being used by Ask a Ninja to support it’s fan club. It’s a pretty easy to use service and provides a lot of functionality.

Marc provides some very interesting statistics about the growth of Ning. They now have over 200,000 social networks and will quickly surpass 300,000.

• Over 70% of the networks on Ning are active, as defined by “used in the last 30 days”. This is a considerably higher percentage than we would have thought when we created the service, given that we make it so easy to create a network that you can do it in two minutes, for free — I would have assumed there would be more throwaways. It turns out that people really like using social networks!


• As that “70% active” statistic indicates, the long tail is most definitely alive and well on Ning — activity on the system as a whole is spread out broadly across the base of active networks. This continues even as the largest networks on Ning are getting much larger than ever before.


• There are now more — actually, a lot more — social networks on Ning than there are on the rest of the Internet in total, including all of the other services that let you create your own social network combined (i.e., all of our honorable competitors combined). (Note: I highlighted this part)


• Our growth rate continues to accelerate as the overall penetration of social networking across the Internet expands. As more and more people all over the world use social networking — including the big one-size-fits-all social networking services that many people use first — people become more interested in creating and using their own social networks for many topics that they care about. This is a very large market, and it’s growing very fast.


• Finally, fewer than 1% of our current networks fall into the adult category — a number that’s frankly surprisingly low, but one with which we’re just fine.

I think this is great. I like Ning a lot and hope it is hugely successful.

I had two main reactions to the post. My first reaction was to challenge the boast that Ning’s 200,000 social networks is more than the rest of the Internet in total. I think he’s got that way wrong. Social networks have been around for a long time on the Internet in the form of forums. And there are way, way more than 200,000 forums on the Internet.

But my second reaction was to ask what’s missing from this data that matters. What’s missing is information about whether Ning is here to stay or not. Networks, users and page views are all good, but money is what matters.

I want to know if Ning is cash flow positive. Have they figured out a way to make their social networking business profitable? I want to know because if I recommend to a podcaster or company that they should use Ning as their social networking platform, I want to be sure that Ning will not go away someday.

If Ning stopped, I may be able to get the data out of Ning, but then what do I do. The data is set up to be used in Ning’s infrastructure. I don’t see where I would go to get the same kind of service and the business interruption would be very costly. Anyone who is setting up a Ning social network and not considering this risk is being foolish.

So I have to ask Mr. Andreessen and Ning, how can we be sure Ning is here to stay? Open up the books and show us a nice secure balance sheet and a cash positive business, or at least something that convinces people that Ning is here to stay.

by Alex Nesbitt
digitalpodcast.com

AOL/Bebo Buy Could Create Second-Largest Social Platform

In a move that should help them secure a bigger slice of the social networking world, AOL has entered into an agreement to purchase social platform Bebo. The social platform boasts 40 million unique users worldwide; once joined with AOL's AIM and ICQ systems AOL that number will grow to 80 million uniques.

With 80 million unique users, the AOL/Bebo baby will be larger than Facebook (67 million uniques) but still smaller than MySpace.

What exactly is AOL getting?

According to comScore, Bebo is one of the fastest growing social networks with 688% growth from January 2007 to January 2008. Facebook showed only 11% growth and MySpace 8% growth during the same period. Though their total unique users are much fewer than MySpace or Facebook, Bebo users spend more time in the social space. Bebo users spent 217 minutes in the social space in January while Facebook users spent 198 minutes and MySpace users spent only 156 minutes.

HitWise found that Bebo was the fourth most popular social platform following MySpace, Facebook and MyYearbook in February 2008. More than 80% of Bebo traffic for February was return traffic. In the UK, Bebo is the brand most searched for, leading both Ebay and Facebook.

Looking ahead into 2008, Bebo has plans to launch social platforms in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain. AOL, also, has announced plans to spread their social wings a bit more with some reporting that the company plans to expand into 30 more countries by 2009.


by Kristina Knight
bizreport.com

AOL buys social network Bebo for $850 million

In an unexpected move, AOL has acquired social-networking site Bebo. The price tag: $850 million in cash.

Rumors had floated over the past few months that Bebo, which has over 40 million members, was up for sale. Reports suggested a $1 billion price tag, but there were few hints as to potential buyers. Though Bebo had already partnered with AOL's AIM messaging client to facilitate friend-invite interoperability between the two services, even the most creative blogger speculation didn't seem to point to AOL eventually buying the social network.

Ironically, AOL itself has been talked about as an acquisition target. Jeffrey Bewkes, CEO of Time Warner, which operates AOL, has spoken recently about plans to spin off or sell divisions of the company.

AOL has made it clear that buying Bebo is a move geared toward international growth, as the youth-oriented social network is wildly popular in the U.K., Ireland, and New Zealand. AOL reported that it has launched "17 international web sites over the last year and has plans to expand to 30 countries outside the U.S. by the end of 2008," as well as international versions of its home page and some services. Bebo, meanwhile, plans to launch five localized versions of its service this year (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands), and AOL will make it a major part of the company's international expansion strategy.

"Bebo is the perfect complement to AOL's personal communications network and puts us in a leading position in social media," said AOL chairman and CEO Randy Falco in a statement. "What drew us to Bebo was its substantial and fast-growing worldwide user-base, its vision of a truly social web, and the monetization opportunities...This positions us to offer advertisers even greater reach and marketers significant insights into the desires and needs of consumers."

Additionally, despite the fact that performance monitoring firms have pegged it as sluggish, Bebo's technology was likely appealing to AOL. The social network's developer platform supports both OpenSocial and Facebook applications; it also has an "Open Media" platform for audio and video content from big-media names like CBS and MTV as well as online production outlets like Next New Networks and Ustream. AOL, meanwhile, has opened up AIM to developers.

In a conference call on Thursday, Falco and Ron Grant, AOL's president and COO, as well as Bebo president Joanna Shields, said that integration between Bebo and AOL's AIM and ICQ messaging properties will be crucial. Combined, they said, AOL will own a "social graph" of 80 million people, bigger than the 67 million that the independently-run Facebook currently counts but still significantly smaller than News Corp.'s MySpace.com.

"The distribution aspect of linking up with AIM and ICQ is an extraordinary opportunity for us," Shields said in the conference call.

Still, at the core, the Bebo acquisition is all about the advertising. It comes at a time when AOL is still struggling to make the transition to a leader in online advertising after amassing nearly $1 billion worth in acquisitions--Tacoda, Buy.at, Quigo, and AdTech, to name a few--into its Platform-A ad network, as well as social-media buys like Goowy. Bebo, like most other social-networking sites, relies on ad revenue, and as projections claim that social-media ad buys will keep rising (eMarketer predicts 75 percent year over year), AOL undoubtedly wants a piece of the pie.

But it's still an uphill climb for AOL. Just this week, the company confirmed that Platform-A president Curt Viebranz was departing the company amid a management shakeup.

Joanna Shields, president of the San Francisco-based Bebo, will continue to run the social network and will report to Ron Grant. The deal was brokered on AOL's side by Bank of America Securities and Deutsche Bank Securities. Bebo had hired investment bank Allen & Co. when it opted to put itself up for sale.

Grant estimated in Thursday's conference call that the deal will ideally be complete within a month.

Is social networking a waste of time?

timesonline.co.uk

There has been much fuss of late over the loss of productivity brought on by employees multi-tasking between actual work and social networking. One estimate puts the cost to British industry at £6.5 billion per annum in lost productivity and questionable bandwidth usage. Another survey estimates that Britain’s social media fanatics are spending as much as 12 hours per week on these sites, no doubt eating into valuable work time.

But what is the impact of this collective Facebook/MySpace/Bebo addiction on high school and university students, our bright future? A new survey this week by IT specialists Global Secure Systems, (the ones who took a look at the impact on businesses and arrived at the £6.5 billion figure), says students are also guilty of sneaking in a fair bit of social networking during the school day.

In their survey of 500 English school children between the ages of 13 and 17, 51 per cent confess to checking their social network profiles during lessons. Over a quarter admit their in-school daily social network fix exceeds over 30 minutes each day.

If this sounds surprising, you haven’t been to school lately. Laptop-toting school kids are the norm these days, as are Wifi-enabled campuses. And when the laptop is in the locker, there are net-enabled smart phones at the ready. Add to the equation the rocket-fast texting ability of your typical 16-year-old and you get an explosion of social networking opportunities at the most unlikely points in the school day.

No educator would knowingly allow such a distraction in their classroom, and yet it appears to be happening right under their noses. It’s hard enough getting the PlayStation generation to focus for even a half-hour on a lecture of, say, King John and the Magna Carta. Try competing with the latest lunchroom gossip being broadcasted to mobiles, Facebook and Twitter. The significance of establishing modern-day democracy pales in comparison.

Before you shake your head and mutter something starting with the phrase “In my day…”, admit it – how many of you have shirked off work on an important business project to tend to a personal email, text or, these days, a Facebook query? How many of you have done it today? How many of you are doing it now?

We adults might regard tidying up our profile, sending messages to friends or contacts, joining the odd (or oddball) group or participating in a movie knowledge quiz to be a harmless distraction, the kind of thing that keeps us sane during the workday. (While writing this column, I have been twice drawn to my Facebook profile to attend to small matters, but that’s it. No more for me today. Okay, maybe after lunch.) But teens are deadly serious about social networks. For them, failing to attend to these duties could end friendships, sink reputations and mean missed opportunities to climb the fickle and precarious social ladder of young adulthood. I say we ought to go easy on them if they are neglecting some of their responsibilities while they fuss around with their online persona.

As a university lecturer at John Cabot University in Rome I encourage my students, all in their early twenties, to embrace social media and every other Web 2.0 application out there. Yes, posting photos of you and your semi-clad friends boozing it up late at night could sink your chances with a prospective employer, who will no doubt be snooping around for this very type of incriminating evidence. But the good far outweighs the bad. I encourage the students to be creative, to promote our online student newspaper, which just over a year from launch is pulling in steadily rising traffic. No doubt all the blog, Facebook and MySpace mentions are helping. I’ve had students who use social networking sites to build and promote projects on fighting poverty and eradicating hunger, organising music gigs, art and photo exhibitions, plus coordinating meet-ups for political rallies.

I admire the growing number of young students who dedicate hours to designing complicated widgets and applications too. Yes, they’re probably neglecting their history paper to complete it, but the end product is a far more valuable lesson learned in creativity, courage and computer coding. When I look at all the creativity, the collaboration and the activism being generated in these networks, I am hopeful for the future. Perhaps it is we educators who need to learn how to harness this power into our everyday classroom lessons.

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Bernhard Warner, a freelance journalist and media consultant, writes about technology, the internet and media industries.