nextmuffin - digital marketing crumbs

Ever fancied creating your own social network? Ning allows you to do just that.

For those that haven’t come across it yet, Ning offers anyone the chance to create their own personalised, customisable social network, with an easy to use interface system, and the facility to host on your own domain.

At the last count, Ning supports over 220,000 social networks (you’d think there are some pretty small ones in there), with some that seem to have up to 6,000+ members.

As someone remarked to me at work, things like Facebook usually start in a centralised place, before being available everywhere from multiple providers. And I guess if you look at free web based email, that stands to reason.

So will Ning overtake MySpace / Facebook as the preferred social network platform? I’d still argue no, at least for now.

Using free web email as an example again, Hotmail was the brand leader in this space over 10 years ago, and is still one of them, even though these days you can get free web email from almost anyone you choose to. Why?

Probably simply because once you have one, you don’t need another. You have a free email address, everyone knows it, and to change would be inconvenient. Or in other words, why bother with Ning when all my friends are already on Facebook? There’s a great deal to be said for being first to market sometimes.

From an advertisers point of view, I expect a few clients to be asking if they should be starting their own Ning. My answer will ultimately depend on who they are. If they genuinely have content to put online that other people will be so interested in they will want to join the group, then this is a great way to communicate with them. Bands are a great example, with fans all over the web keen to interact with their idols.

But for a financial client? It’s hard to think how much fun you can have with your bank, but maybe this is a chance for banks to change that perception. For a good example of corporate use, see the Saturn Ning link below.

Lastly, from a revenue point of view, Ning openly describes it’s business model as following:

1. Contextual Advertising. It’s free to create your own social network on Ning. On free networks, we reserve the right to run ads. Currently these ads are powered by Google AdSense.

2. Premium Services. Network Creators can buy additional features to add to your social network on Ning. These currently include the right to run your own advertising, the option to use your own domain name, the option to remove the “Create Your Own Network” promotional links, and additional storage and bandwidth.

Contextual advertising in general has been one of the success stories of the internet, but in this case it may not prove to be the most effective model. As any SEM professional will tell you, there’s a lot less value in content generated listings vs. active searches for a product, so ROI focused online marketeers are unlikely to jump on Ning as the next new volume opportunity on their schedule.

If I were Ning (and I’m sure they have), I’d think about how to use they can use all the personal data collected from users at registration to target based on demographics, as well as behaviour. In practise, combining contextual or behavioral targeting with demographics could be more lucrative. I for one can think of plenty of brand managers who would love to reach their exact target demographic who have expressed an active interest in certain products.

Anyway, the key to online ad revenues is volume of users. Get that right in a big way, and you will have fun monetising that audience for years to come. Good luck Ning!

Links:
http://www.ning.com/
http://www.imsaturn.com

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Ning User Growth (Number of Social Networks)