MTV Networks has acquired the remaining portion of Social Project that it did not already own. Terms were not disclosed. Previously, MTV Networks was a minority investor in Social Project, which is behind the Flux social-networking platform powering many of its sites, including MTV.com, TheDailyShow.com, and ColbertNation.com. Social Project, which competes with Ning and KickApps, had previously raised $47.5 million, mostly from MTV’s parent company Viacom.
Social Project started life as Tagworld, before partnering with Viacom to add social media features to its sites. Last November, Flux was launched as a joint venture to let people create their own niche social networks and tap into Viacom’s vast library of video content. Since then, Flux has added about 2 million members, bringing the total to 7.6 million across about 1,000 different sites. The biggest one is MTV.com, with 600,000 registered members. Of those, 250,000 40,000 signed up on one day alone, the day of the MTV Video Music Awards on September 7. (You have to be registered to leave a rating or comment.). And, according to MTV Networks, engagement levels across all of MTV.com (as measured by time spent on the site and pageviews) are up 20 percent, and up 140 percent among Flux members.
Compared to other social networking platforms, Flux still powers a relatively small number of sites. For instance, there are 475,000 individual Ning social networks, compared to 1,000 for Flux. But the number of people each one reaches may not be so far apart. Although Ning does not break out its total number of registered members, comScore measures 6.9 million monthly unique visitors worldwide. That is not an apples-to-apples comparison to Flux’s 7.6 million registered users. Monthly visitors and registered users are two different things and, unfortunately, comScore does not do a good job measuring Flux. (For a point-by-point comparison of Flux and Ning, see Last year, Ning CEO Gina Bianchini analysis that we published last year on TechCrunch).
Flux, for its part, is trying to position itself more as a platform for sharing social media in than a social network per se. For instance, if I am a Flux member on MTV.com and then I join your Flux social network, I can automatically bring my entire collection of videos and other content that I’ve already organized on MTV.com with me. I’m not sure how much people will want to organize their social lives around Viacom content, but this acquisition does give the media company a way to add social networking features to all of its sites without relying on a someone else’s technology, whether that be Ning, Facebook, or MySpace.
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Good for Flux!
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Please drop of the face of the planet.
thanks for the Spam! I’ll be sure to check out your garbage product now!
Can I use pop-up and pop-under ads? Cuz those are the only ones I like.
I’m sure the influentials and others you’ve hit on this blog will be likely to use your product after seeing your damn spam everyf’inday. I mean reach x frequency, right?
You can tell they’re legit because they use Domains By Proxy.
Flux could be a little more elegeantly designed, and it can be a little buggy (e.g. photos don’t always render qucikly/properly) - hope MTV money solves these little issues.
But, for bands like us, it is a great platform to reach music fans who are already community members of one or more of the Flux sites (MTV Soundtrack, The Wallflowers, Sheryl Crow, etc.) Once fans are members of one community, it only takes a couple of clicks to join another community.
Good luck Flux.
Nexo is in beta still, but it kicks Ning on usability. I had need to create a network that older, not as computer literate people could use and Nexo won.
Go flux! Hope it kicks butt! (I still like Ning for now)
Smart exit, I bet it was in their strategy all along to bring on investors that could provide an exit in the future.
I talked with Flux, they were great, but couldn’t open a community there as they didn’t have music uploading. Ironic, as they are now part of MTV.
So we went to ning.
FLUX is awesome. Go MTV Networks for getting in the digital game!
Ning is a vacant shell hoping for a buy out offer. Most of their monthly traffic comes from thisis50.com who they demoted after he signed a deal with KYTE. Even so, that site has over 325,000 members who are on it all day and all night driving the comscore.
325,000 members, about 2 million pageviews…a good number if only they didn’t use Google Adsense, lol. I don’t think Ning earns more than $3000 a day