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Today I'm delighted to announce that Ning just crossed 200,000 social networks for the first time!

For those of you new to this blog, Ning is my third company, cofounded with Gina Bianchini. We enable you to create your own social network for anything -- in two minutes, for free. Think of it as creating your own MySpace, Facebook, or Youtube -- but around any topic you want, with whatever set of features you want, and as public or private as you want.

People are using Ning today to create and run social networks around practically every topic you can possibly think of.

And as of today, they (you) have created more than 200,000 networks on Ning.

What's the significance of 200,000 social networks to Ning?

Number of networks is our primary public metric, both because it's important in its own right -- the more networks on Ning, the more new people who are drawn to Ning to join an existing network and then perhaps create networks of their own -- and because it's a leading indicator of overall usage of Ning.

We're experiencing 0.5%+ day-over-day growth of number of networks on Ning, which means that we're adding more than 1,000 new networks per day -- and that's accelerating.

In fact, at our current growth rate, we'll cross 300,000 networks in a matter of weeks.

Based both on this rapid creation of new networks and rapidly increasing use of existing networks, we are seeing even stronger growth in number of registered users (1.0%+ per day) and page views (1.5%+ per day), as well as uniques.

Here are some additional interesting facts that come out of this:

• Over 70% of the networks on Ning are active, as defined by "used in the last 30 days". This is a considerably higher percentage than we would have thought when we created the service, given that we make it so easy to create a network that you can do it in two minutes, for free -- I would have assumed there would be more throwaways. It turns out that people really like using social networks!
• As that "70% active" statistic indicates, the long tail is most definitely alive and well on Ning -- activity on the system as a whole is spread out broadly across the base of active networks. This continues even as the largest networks on Ning are getting much larger than ever before.
• There are now more -- actually, a lot more -- social networks on Ning than there are on the rest of the Internet in total, including all of the other services that let you create your own social network combined (i.e., all of our honorable competitors combined).
• Our growth rate continues to accelerate as the overall penetration of social networking across the Internet expands. As more and more people all over the world use social networking -- including the big one-size-fits-all social networking services that many people use first -- people become more interested in creating and using their own social networks for many topics that they care about. This is a very large market, and it's growing very fast.
• Finally, fewer than 1% of our current networks fall into the adult category -- a number that's frankly surprisingly low, but one with which we're just fine.

If you've never experienced Ning, feel free to give it a shot by either going to the Ning home page -- from which you can create your own social network with a few clicks -- or explore the Ning Blog to see lots of examples of social networks on Ning.

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