

Ning keeps growing. Over half million networks now. - shafqat
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/ning_500000_networks.php

======
randomwalker
I think Ning may be falling into a common trap. Just like many websites obsess
over their visitor numbers, Ning obsesses over the number of networks created.
This affects the site design: right on the front page, there's a huge "Create"
widget that doesn't even check if something with the same name already exists.
Try doing a search for say, "entrepreneurs." You'll get dozens of little
networks, many of which have identical goals.

This duplication clearly hurts Ning: because of the network effect, merging
two networks doesn't make it twice as useful -- it makes it four times as
useful. I'm sure Ning knows this, but they aren't able to do anything about it
because if they change the design, and the pace of network creation slows
down, their investors might look at the chart and panic.

Ning is unique in their space, so right now they don't have much to worry
about. But they have to be really careful about the fragmentation or else at
some point they will have more networks than users and the useful activity
will get drowned out in a sea of noise.

~~~
grag
Some good points, but I'm not sure network duplication is really an issue
here. If 100 people want to try to create an entrepreneur network and see if
they can get a real user base going then that's fine. I doubt many users find
networks to join by browsing through them on ning.com anyway, but instead
probably come across them from elsewhere online. In that sense ning is
somewhat similar to a hosted blogging platform. It obviously wouldn't make
sense for blogger.com to try to merge similar blogs...

------
sown
Neat. So how much money do they make?

------
webwright
I will be impressed with Ning's growth only when they start using the 'active
user' metric. the spam/ghost town networks on Ning are a huge part of their
"growth".

~~~
shafqat
Take it with a grain of salt, but Compete shows pretty nice user growth as
well. <http://siteanalytics.compete.com/ning.com/?metric=uv>

~~~
webwright
Now THAT, I'd believe in. 3.5 uniques a month seems reasonable and a good
number to tout (though it's woeful compared to any other site with that level
of funding).

But, given their 500,000 networks #, that means that they are getting.... 7
uniques per network per month? Assuming zero overlap?

And uniques are a bad metric, too. They have 1.5 million indexed pages (
<http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aning.com> ) - I'd wager 1/3 to 1/2 of
their uniques are from long-tail search queries. And I'd further wager than
50%+ of those uniques BOUNCE (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounce_Rate>), so
exactly what percentage of those 3.5m uniques actually do ANYTHING? Bounce
rates of 30-50% for search engine traffic are pretty good, so...

