Just last October, we reported that Ning hosted half a million social networks, and today, the social network provider announced that it has hit 1 million networks. Ning, which hosts custom social networks, was co-founded by Marc Andreesen and launched in 2005. Of course, as is so often the case, while Ning now has about 22 million registered users, only 6.1 million of these are active users. And while 1 million networks definitely sounds impressive, only about a fifth of these are currently active.
As we reported last year, about 3% of Ning’s users are paying $19.95 a month for Ning’s premium service. On average more than 1,000 new networks are opened up on Ning every single day. A lot of these are small niche networks like the Open Wine Consortium, but the service also currently hosts very active custom networks for the Ellen DeGeneres show, rapper 50 Cent, and Harry Potter and Twilight fans, for example.
Ning is also an active proponent of OpenSocial and hosts a vast directory of OpenSocial apps that its users can use on their profile pages and networks.
Ning raised $60 million last April, and if Dan Frommer’s calculations are right, it currently has an annual revenue of about $10 million from paid accounts, premium features, and advertising.
Compared to Facebook and MySpace, Ning, of course, is only a niche product, but it has clearly found its place in the social networking space.
