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Ning's business model (ning.com)
12 points by prakash on March 20, 2008 | hide | past | favorite | 2 comments



There model's not a bad one. Most analysts predictions is that in social networking, two things will happen:

A) There will be a couple of massive players (Myspace, Facebook, etc.)

B) There will be a ton of niche players--you already see this with sites that cater specifically to pet lovers (http://www.petcrash.com/, http://fuzzster.com), expectant fathers (http://www.brandnewdad.com), etc.

Andreessen is betting (probably correctly) that people will be much more interested in using a service like Ning than going out and building their own social networking site from scratch. He can monitize on targeted ads and value-added features, and it seems like B (above) is in fact not only happening, but working well!

Ning passes 200,000 social networks http://blog.pmarca.com/2008/03/ning-passes-200.html

Some interesting elements:

- "We're experiencing 0.5%+ day-over-day growth of number of networks on Ning, which means that we're adding more than 1,000 new networks per day -- and that's accelerating."

- "Over 70% of the networks on Ning are active, as defined by 'used in the last 30 days'"


maybe they should talk to myspace or facebook about trying to monetize. $1 gifts!




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