Even though Ning is believed to have over 20 million visitors a month, and had 1 million uniques a year ago, things obviously have not been going too well for them.

They have announced large scale staff cut-backs following a change in leadership – their previous CEO Gina Bianchini left the company last month and Jason Rosenthal has taken her place.

Ning was valued at $500 million one year ago, based on their then-proclaimed user numbers and estimated ad revenues. Rosenthal decided that they need to re-evaluate their working systems. After studying the business, he concluded that they needed to focus on their premium services business.

Premium Ning Networks drive 75% of their monthly U.S. traffic. Network Creators who use these services will need to pay for many more services and features. They are, therefore, going to change their strategy to devote 100% of their resources to building the bread-winning products.

Ning will phase out free services shortly. Existing free networks will have the opportunity to either convert to paying for premium services or move away from Ning.

In effect, paying customers will be required to pay higher prices and free customers will have the choice to either start paying for services or leave Ning and move their networks over to other sites.

Users on the Ning Creators forum thread where this announcement was made have already started talking about leaving Ning. New threads have cropped up listing a number of viable options, which currently include Grou.ps, Spruz, SocialGO, BuddyPress, Lovd By Less and Elgg.

While it makes sense that those who use Ning to build full-fledged networks for their users should invest in the service, a vast number of networks have been created on Ning only because it was the best free alternative. Most of these networks do not have a financial reason to exist, and when Ning shuts down their free service, they will leave the network in droves.

The latest statistics, collected by Brian Solis of Google Ad Planner, and published on Information is Beautiful, show that women also dominate the social web.

While the numbers seem to be more or less equal on a few of the social sites like LinkedIn, DeviantArt and YouTube, it has been found that the men are far outnumbered by the number of women on most of the other sites like Facebook, FriendFeed, Twitter, MySpace etc.

The percentages of women using some of the popular social sites are as follows:

The only site on which men were found to outnumber women was Digg, which has 4.7 million more men (64% of the user base).

While there will definitely be those who say that women dominate the social Web because women often have more time to spend on unimportant matters, like chatting with their friends, because more women stay at home all the time as compared to the number of men, it is also very possible that women spend more time on social networks than men because they are the ones who really care about people and like to nurture and strengthen relationships.

Whatever the reasons for this difference, these demographics will certainly be very useful to marketers, as they give a very good indication of what sort of products and campaigns should be displayed on the social networks in order to get good conversion rates.

Ning, the Silicon Valley based company that allows people to build their own social networks, had its beta launch in 2005 and full launch just about two years ago, in 2007. Last week, they attained the status of having one million user-built networks, up from half a million networks last October.

Only about 200,000 (one-fifth) of these networks are currently active. Of the 22 million registered users, only about 6.1 million users are believed to be active.

Even though Ning took the decision to shut down almost 20% of their pages in December 2008, as they contained adult or pornographic material, CEO Gina Bianchini told CNet News that they made up their lost clientele by February 2009.

Networks created by Ning users are based on any subject that the users are concerned about. The 20% of social networks that are currently active on the site receive almost 2.5 million bits of content every day, including images and comments, and over 1,000 new networks are created every day.

The company has tried to remain innovative and up-to-date with technology by adding new features, such as a ‘persistent chat’ feature, as is found on Facebook and providing a directory of social applications for network creators. They have also revamped their home page recently.

In the initial stages of their existence, Ning had three separate sites for videos, photos and groups but they have all been merged into a single entity now. According to estimates last year, the company was valued at $500 million, which has probably gone up now that they have grown past a million networks. Their revenue of about $10 million comes through paid accounts, advertising and premium features.

OpenSocial will be accessible at the URL: http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial, which will go live on Thursday.

When launched, OpenSocial will consist of three common APIs, defined by Google with input from partners, which allow developers to access core functions and information on social networks:

• Profile Information (user data)
• Friends Information (social graph)
• Activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff)

Unlike the most popular social networks, OpenSocial will allow developers to code using ordinary JavaScript and HTML. This will help it gain tremendous popularity as it precludes the need for application developers to learn and code in various proprietary languages created by the numerous social networks.

Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle are the platforms that have already agreed to partner with Google on OpenSocial. Application developers Flixster, iLike, RockYou and Slide are also on board. Interestingly, all these application developers have seen great success on Facebook.

Hints that Google might plan to expand further into the social networking arena surfaced last month when a leaked video showed Google employees discussed the company’s plans to introduce more social features into Google Reader.

Advertising on Social Networks

Google has not mentioned any specifics at present about whether or not advertising will be accepted, but it is obvious that this will be their way to gain access to most of the popular social networks without needing to buy them outright!

Once a number of developers build popular apps that get included by scores of users on their profiles, Google will be able to easily set up revenue-share schemes, similar to AdSense for regular content publishers, which will allow developers to include ads in their apps and make money for themselves and Google with minimum effort. The image below shows what this might look like conceptually:

Rather than using brute force to gain access to a number of users, Google has used a cunning method to reach the same attractive user base without spending too much money. They were probably not too bothered when Microsoft bought a stake in Facebook either.

The success of such an ad placement strategy depends on two factors: (1) whether the host social networks will allow applications to carry ads that don’t earn them any money, and (2) whether Google will provide enough incentives for the developers to include ads alongside their applications. For now, one can only wait and watch how Google will monetise this new channel.