Ning is a free social network customization building platform created by Marc Andreessen and Gina Bianchini. The company recently announced that they will be rolling out an application platform for developers to build upon. The company launched Ning Apps to about 1.5 million social networks hosted by the service as of yesterday. Ning Apps is based on the Google OpenSocial platform. About 90 applications from a wide variety of services are available as of today.
Some of the applications include Hulu, Wordpress, PollDaddy, Twitter Tracker, Qik, and Tungle.me. These applications have different skins in order to match the look and feel of the social network that they are being installed on.
Ning raised $15 million back in July which gave them a valuation of $750 million. What the company’s exit strategy is… I don’t know.
Social network customization service Ning.com has raised $15 million in Series E funding. This investment places Ning at a valuation of $750 million. Last year Ning raised $60 million at a $500 million valuation.
Ning currently has about 29.3 million registered users and over 1 million social networks. The company was founded by Marc Andreessen and Gina Bianchini. Andreessen recently launched his own venture firm with former partner Ben Horowitz. The venture firm that was started by Andreessen is called Andreessen Horowitz.
“The growth at Ning has been massive in the last year and, combined with the quality of the team and seeing that kind of momentum, it worked out well for us both,” stated Lightspeed Venture Partner Managing Director and co-founder Ravi Mhatre.
Ning, the social network platform created by Marc Andreessen and Gina Bianchini has hit the 1 million milestone. Over 1 million social networks have been created using their platform. The company was started in October 2004 and launched officially in October 2005. The company raised over $100 million in funding.
About 22 million users have registered for the service and they lost about 20% of traffic this past December because of the decision to shut down adult content and porn social networks. Last February the traffic has been able to catch up. Ning’s traffic comes mostly from social networks that have a strong following. For example, thetwilightsaga.com is a fan website built on Ning that had 94,000 people join within two months.
Athena von Oech announced today that Ning has hit 850,000 registered social networks. Ning is a service that allows users to create social networks on-the-fly. The service is free for basic social networks, but premium social networks are charged. Ning was founded by Netscape founder Marc Andreesen and Gina Bianchini. Ning has over $104 million in funding and is valuated at about $500 million based on their investments. Legg Mason, Allen & Company, and Andreesen are the primary investors in the company.
“We just passed 850,000 social networks on Ning and we couldn’t be more excited,” stated Oech. “We love checking out the new and interesting social networks popping up – at the rate of over 3,000 each day, and about 100,000 in the past month alone. Wow!”
Ning plans on launching new features next week including improvements to chat and redesigned media players. Below is a video demo of the new features:
