"Because of the apparent staying power of blogs in corporate settings, eMarketer forecasts continued growth in company use of blogs for marketing purposes. This year, eMarketer estimates just over one in three companies have a public-facing blog used for marketing, a proportion that will rise to 43% by 2012."
Social Networks not only act as powerful traffic attractor and referrals, but also as gateways toward other sites: this takes place when users log on one site using their ID from another. Gigya, another analytic company, found out that Facebook captured 46% of third party login, vs. 17% for Google, 14% for Twitter, 13% for Yahoo, 7% for MySpace and 2% for LinkedIn.
Jason told us that about a month after taking the CEO gig in March, he boiled down the numbers and learned that paid users accounted for 80% of the Ning's revenues and about 75% of its traffic.
Faced with a "list longer than my arm of things we could do for our most passionate users," he decided to re-shape Ning into a company that caters to these paying customers only.
"If you're running a service that's so inherently valuable to your users, it's a logical next step to have them pay a nominal fee to use it," Jason explained.
Ning sizes the new premium market at around $4 billion.
One of the things I have come to understand in my work in social network analysis is that being able to make sense of the connections -- the lines among us -- gives us access to questions and insights we might not otherwise have.
Founder @ Dearing Group LLC.
George can be reached via email at george@dearinggroup.com or on Twitter, and Facebook Subscribe to this site via RSS here.
