Ning At The Half Million Mark

Posted by Kenneth Ronkowitz on


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The Ning blog posted that they now host 500,000 social networks. Ning hit the Net in February 2007, so that's about a new social network every 30 seconds.Other ources estimate that about 65% of the Ning sites are active which is a good percentage.

Ning is primarily a free service though 3% of users are paying $19.95 a month for Ning's premium service which let's them use Ning on their own domain and be ad-free run their own ads. Ning has competitors (KickApps & Crowdvine are two) but they are in the lead.

Ning has a good number of academics and teachers who use it for networks and blogs for their courses and for organizations and research projects. I know a few teachers who use it instead of a course management system (it can be made private). I belong to several groups that use Ning both privately (NJEDge DLAAB) and public (Classroom 2.0, NCTE's 2008 Conference). There are also plenty of sites you can find through their search - over 500 educational technology networks.

Of course, these are SOCIAL netorks, so there's some fun stuff out there too - Chris Pirillo's Geeks! Network, one for the Ellen DeGeneres show, and rapper 50 Cent's social network.

If you want to get a sense of what Ning can do, or you think social networks are just Facebook & MySpace, take a look at a few of these samples, find one that interests you and join.

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