At the beginning of last December, Ning reversed course on its anything-legal-goes policy by declaring a prohibition on adult social networks. The reason? Porn wasn’t paying the bills; instead of attracting advertisers, it was scaring them away. Legal adult content was also begetting illegal content, which drew the ire of both authorities and lawyers with DMCA notices in hand.
Given the report released by CPM Advisors at the beginning of 2008, which suggested that Ning relied on adult content for much of its traffic, one might expect Ning to take a hit after shooing the smut out the door. But according to comScore traffic from January, that hasn’t been the case at all.
Ning gave adult networks until January 5th to pack up their bags and leave. That gives us the rest of the month to see how the network of networks fared without them. And it actually fared quite well, picking up almost 1 million unique visitors in the United States (from 3.94 million in December to 4.79 million in January). That pickup is almost enough to pass Bebo, which attracted 4.97 million Americans in January and barely managed to halt a downslide that surely didn’t make AOL happy.
What’s not clear is whether there’s been much dispute over what constitutes adult content. As far as we can tell – and as CEO Gina Bianchini outlined prior to the evictions – Ning hasn’t prohibited nudity entirely. Nudist social networks are still listed in its directory, for example, although all of them appear to be private networks. If you’ve run a Ning network with borderline content that has been either kicked out or allowed to stay, please let us know in the comments.
Looks like it really made sense for them. Too bad it was done in a get-the-hell-out way.
All those poor networkers seem to flood our service, WackWall
Excellent job Ning.
It was a great move and it made great business sense. There is way too much porn, viagra ads, obey one stomach rule rubbish on the Internet, and ning made the smart choice of lifting themselves above it to create a solid long term sustainable business.
Congratulations.
Anjali Sen
Congratulaions Ning.
You made a sound decision to take the high road and to not lower yourself. It turns out to have been good business sense as well.
Well done!
Anjali Sen
txaaaa thats just silly… high road, ethically speaking they took the low road, they promised something and then they changed their word… and that is always a bad thing..
also most of the adult networks were on private domains so even though ning.com increased, their overall traffic might have not… still who cares…
also… this must be a slow news day, this isnt great news, seems more like giving more free publicity to ning (if this was 6 months from now… well then its ok… a month later, means little in statistics)
They definitely took the high road. I am proud to be an owner of a Ning network and not have my work or reputation sullied.
I am sure porn consumers have plenty of other places to go.
I agree with Anjali. There is enough porn on the web already. Neither Nina nor Mark felt it was worth it to sully their names and reputation in order to make a quick buck. And guess what, it actually helped their business.
well if it helped their business, that’s is yet to be seen, and i think their names and reputation was more damaged by going back on their word and being untrustworthy, especially in the way they did it… and i spoke with gina a couple of times and she was always nice, but when this happen she was a stone wall and kinda rude… it just shows that you cant base your business on other peoples platforms (white label, hosted apps…), better to make your own and don’t rely on anyone ^_^
Put yourself in Marc’s shoes.
You started the Internet revolution. You led three major companies. You are a legend with a gigantic legacy for future generations.
Given all this, do would you want your grandchildren to remember you as a peddler of porn in your twilight years?
It’s like Tom Daschle. Now people will always remember him for something sleazy instead of all of his great accomplishments.
Leave porn, Adultfriendfinder, obey one stomach rule scams, pop ups, pop unders, spyware, etc. for lesser people. There is no shortage of people who cannot become true giants.
yeah, I can see all those users flooding your service via alexa: http://www.alex...ls/wackwall.com
It’s a flood! On the other hand, wackwall is a great name for social networks based on wacking off.
No shwing from Ning
i wonder how that extensions guy that got kicked off of ning is doing – forgot the name…if anyone has info i am curious…
Extensions?
He’s referring to widget laboratory.
Widget Lab are on http://www.socialgo.com now.
Ning really impressed me with their “anything legal goes” attitude at launch. To just kick out hundreds or thousands of networks because they couldn’t monetize them seems unfair, especially considering adult traffic is worth a lot more money than mainstream traffic. A better solution would have been to create an adults-only product and push all of the adult networks there, displaying adult-oriented ads on them.
Might seem unfair, but it also might be a business opportunity.
Just because Ning couldn’t monetize adult traffic alongside the rest of their traffic doesn’t mean someone else couldn’t do very well with an adult only version of Ning. They’d have a ready made userbase too in the form of the Ning evictees.
I’m glad Ning is doing well without the adult industry. Kudos to them.
I think it’s only the US and Middle-East that classifies all nudity as adult.
maybe locator dude had something to do with this.
i have learned so much from the service that only gets better as time goes on. i see very little difference of overall functionionality when compared to any other major social network. users are creating custom profiles that would rival any major social network. im proud of my ning sites and how they naturally perform with no marketing at all. people will forever want to position themselves in social sites that are niche to what they do for a living or who they are in life. get a premium domain connected to ning and the rest can be history.
MiRaza.com – Puro Internet
Yeah maybe you need to get banned from ning and techcrunch. Douchebag.
I’m glad Ning made this decision. You can find porn if you want it, and you shouldn’t be forced to host porn if you don’t. I’m sure the porn industry is also doing just fine without Ning.
We had a similar experience at Hubpages.Com. HubPages used to allow adult content. It accounted for 1/3 of our traffic at one time.
Then we removed all of it.
At first, it resulted in a drop in traffic but since then, we’ve seen a very steady rise in new users and this year, according to Quantcast, we are a top-200 web site in terms of US traffic.
I think what people find about porn on the internet mainly is that it’s a good way to download a ton on malware and spyware. Just wrecks the PC basically.
One can invest in really amazing digital security that will leave it clean or turn it off.
http://www.justaskgemalto.com
wise move
why didn’t they just create another site just for porn, rather than shutting everyone down? They could call it porNing.com, and just not serve Google ads there.
SocialGo should be Ning’s biggest fear right now. They have a regular social network maker and working on a social network maker for mature content called Zocku.
They are also growing in popularity, because they have a pretty neat and competitive interface, with a free option that doesn’t kill your network with tons of promotion links.
Fear of what, Ning is wayyyyyyy ahead of the game even without porn!
http://www.alex...amp;size=Medium
no porn really does suck. how can you just drop porn. porn rocks!
lol – ning has no reason to be scared of any social network making website. There are a whole bunch of them. Quit saying silly crap that you were led to believe as a way for that jagoff evil genius at widgetlabs to try to save some face. He got his own dumb ass thrown off the platform for being a turd. Plain and simple. And then tried to take everybody with him. In fact – he auto-signed up over 5,000 users. hahah.
And his reputation on socialgo isn’t doing too well as his promises have gone way past any sort of acceptable due date. And he’s still being a prick.
Here is a link from social go’s own customer service dept. I guess you can’t hide your douscheiness forever widgetlabs.
http://getsatis...u_in_your_place
Is Ning really doing just fine?
http://www.quan...st.com/ning.com
They have 6.2M users, but look a little deeper into the Quantcast data. Key points:
1) most of their users are passers by. That means that users aren’t addicted to the site.
2) They don’t publish page view numbers. One could conclude that those numbers must not be very impressive.
3) Their audience isn’t very attractive from a media perspective. 6.2M washed out users is not a must buy on any plan.
How much revenue do you think that they’re generating and what is the upside? Doesn’t seem like a half billion dollar company to me…
Ning is doing fine with Social media industry.. There is a huge advantage for Ning, is they are rocking with out porn .. Now most of the networks are trying to get out of porn. Myspace removed some thousands of profile in last week or so..
Future of social media : http://ndot.in/blog/?p=34
Video of the Day… Britney Spears Delays Concert, Tells Fans “Don’t Smoke Weed”
There are still thousands and thousands porn networks on ning and every day there coming more..
Ning porn free…? thats a big joke and they (Ning) know it!! LOL
I agree with you, In fact I’m the owner and member of few of them. You need to have a large number of members (my network has about 100000) and you’ll not be kicked out. I have no problem with uploading porn content, only from time to time, they send me a requests, to remove the illegal copyright materials, added by my members. Such networks are not even indexed in the new Ning.com! That’s the whole secret of Ning success in this report… I recommend reading: http://www.char...ms-its-clients/
ps. sorry for my English, that’s not my first language:)