Ning lets consumers and professionals build full social-networking portals, complete with profiles, comments, forums and other familiar features. Earlier this month, Ning CEO Gina Bianchini changed a longstanding policy and disallowed sites with adult content, though she offered no one definition for what constitutes "adult" content.
Bianchini acted against the wishes of Ning cofounder Marc Andreessen, who said that Ning should "let people fundamentally do what they want." On Ning, that wouldn't even include that many people — only about 1 percent of the 675,000 social networks hosted on Ning are adult-oriented.
Her actions have also drawn criticism from leading tech analyst Michael Arrington of TechCrunch.com, who speculated that Bianchini's actions were motivated by one thing: money.
"Ning uses Google for advertising, and Google doesn’t like adult content," he said. "That puts Ning on a bit of a slippery slope when it comes to defining what is and isn’t adult content. But presumably they’ve now drawn that line, and those 1 percent of networks that are on the wrong side of it have been notified. So pack your content, and get out."
Ning lets users instantly build their own social networks, and until this week, social networks built around adult or pornographic themes were allowed, but then Bianchini spiked adult networks in a blog post.
"Adult social networks don’t pull their own weight," she wrote. "Specifically, they require other social networks to work harder because they don’t generate enough advertising or premium service revenue to cover their costs. Plus, our ad partners aren’t big fans of the adult networks and therefore require us to identify adult networks or risk our healthy advertising revenue. We don’t want to be in the policing business and, unchecked, that’s where this is heading."
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