14 DAY TRIAL // Social networking platform Ning has managed to raise another $15 million in funding as part of a quiet round of investments, with the money coming from LightSpeed Venture Partners. The new round valuates the company at the $750 million mark, up from the previous $500 million. The new investment raises the total funding to $119 million.
This latest round was small when compared to previous ones – Ning raised $60 million from Allen & Company last year and $44 million in July 2007 from Legg Mason. Other investors include Chairman Marc Andreessen and LinkedIn Chairman Reid Hoffman. Founded in 2007 by Marc Andreessen and Gina Bianchini, the Palo Alto, California-based company has been growing steadily since it was launched though it saw a small decline in visitors in June.
Ning offers a fresh approach to social networking by allowing its users to set up their own networks based on their interests or other common characteristics. It now has more than 1.3 million networks created inside the ecosystem and 29.3 million registered users worldwide. However, its audience isn't as large, as it managed to attract only 5.1 million unique visitors in the US in June, a 10 percent decline from the previous month. Worldwide the numbers were roughly three times as large.
The company attributed the small decline in June to downtime issues affecting its service as it upgraded part of the infrastructure. However, Ning expects to grow in the coming months, with 4,000 new networks created every day and two million new registered users every month. The fragmented approach hasn't proven as successful as Facebook's “one-size-fits-all” one but there is still space for the company to grow.
Revenue has been coming from the Google ads the company inserts in the pages but there are plans to set up its own advertising network. Other revenue sources are also used, mostly from charging for some services, and new ones are coming in the future.