Ning has raised a total of $120 million and received a valuation of $750 million as of last summer.

The second major change is that the company is reducing their staff by 40%. Below is the full email sent from Ning CEO Jason Rosenthal.

Team,

When I became CEO 30 days ago, I told you I would take a hard look at our business. This process has brought real clarity to what’s working, what’s not, and what we need to do now to make Ning a big success.

My main conclusion is that we need to double down on our premium services business. Our Premium Ning Networks like Friends or Enemies, Linkin Park, Shred or Die, Pickens Plan, and tens of thousands of others both drive 75% of our monthly US traffic, and those Network Creators need and will pay for many more services and features from us.

So, we are going to change our strategy to devote 100% of our resources to building the winning product to capture this big opportunity. We will phase out our free service. Existing free networks will have the opportunity to either convert to paying for premium services, or transition off of Ning. We will judge ourselves by our ability to enable and power Premium Ning Networks at huge scale. And all of our product development capability will be devoted to making paying Network Creators extremely happy.

As a consequence of this change, I have also made the very tough decision to reduce the size of our team from 167 people to 98 people. As hard as this is to do, I am confident that this is the right decision for our company, our business, and our customers. Marc and I will work diligently with everyone affected by this to help them find great opportunities at other companies.

I’ve never seen a more talented and devoted team, and it has been my privilege to get to know and work with each and every one of you over the last 18 months.

We’ll use today to say goodbye to our friends and teammates who will be leaving the company. Tomorrow, I will take you through, in detail, our plans for the next three months and our new focus.

Thanks,
Jason Rosenthal

[TechCrunch]

An Update from Ning Chairman & Co-Founder Marc Andreessen

I’d like to update everyone on a change happening in our company today.

My fellow co-founder and Ning CEO Gina Bianchini has decided to step down after five and a half years of hard and terrific work. I support her wholeheartedly in her decision. Gina is handing the CEO duties over to Jason Rosenthal, who has been our Chief Operating Officer (COO) and head of business operations for the last year and a half. Nothing else is changing–I remain Chairman, the current management team remains exactly the same, and the Ning service continues unchanged.

I’d like to celebrate this moment by enthusiastically congratulating Gina on an amazing series of accomplishments in her time as CEO. Ning today is one of the world’s top social networking properties, with more than 2.3 million user-created Ning Networks and more than 45 million registered users, and is far and away the market leading social platform for interests and passions. Ning Networks span every area of human endeavor, from the arts to business, politics to social activism, and every other field you can think of. Over 5,000 new Ning Networks are created every day, and we’re adding a million new registered users every 12 days. This is all the result of Gina’s incredible dedication, as well as the phenomenal team she has built, since we first started the company.

I am also delighted to mention that Gina is becoming an Executive In Residence (EIR) at my new venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz–my venture capital partner Ben Horowitz and I are looking forward to being able to benefit from her insight and wisdom even more than before.

Gina says: “Now that we have built Ning to its current position in the market, I am ready to hand the reins over to Jason and the team to continue to execute on our vision and strategy. As a founder and large shareholder, I’ll continue to do everything I can to support and cheer on Ning in my new role!”

Let me also give you a thumbnail sketch of Jason Rosenthal, our new CEO. Jason has been a friend and colleague of mine for 15 years–we first worked together at Netscape, where Jason took on a sequence of crucial management roles from the very early days until we sold the company to America Online in 1998. Jason then became the first person my co-founders and I brought onboard when we founded Loudcloud in 1999–our internal nickname for him was “critical hire.” Jason and I then worked together there for nearly 10 years, until we sold that company (renamed Opsware) to Hewlett-Packard in 2007. Since that time, Jason has been immersed in Ning as a senior executive, head of business operations, and COO. Jason is a highly talented executive, manager, and leader, and I can’t think of anyone better to succeed my co-founder Gina as CEO.

Jason says: “Through Gina’s vision, leadership, and passion, she has taken the company from inception to our position today as the largest social platform for interests and passions. It’s been my privilege to work with her for the last 18 months and I look forward to expanding on the outstanding foundation she has put in place.”

Thank you very much for your time and attention, and we’ll see you on Ning!

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.

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.

[via AllThingsD]

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.

[via CNET]

“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:

Find more videos like this on Ning Network Creators