Everybody and their mom has been talking about the SAI 25 (I know, guilty as charged). Ning made it, of course (congrats, guys!) and is slated to make approximately 10 million dollars in 2008 according to Alley Insider. This is news to me.
Let’s run the numbers.
We know that Ning did 71 million pageviews in March. We also know that PVs are growing at 10% a week according to “official” estimates.
What about CPM? I know that Ning is doing mostly text ad inventory, let’s assume its a dollar CPM. I’m just ballparking, of course, but I may be being generous. Facebook’s CPMs have been known to be as low as 10 cents. Granted, Ning’s networks are significantly more niche and targeted, so I’m giving it 10x of Facebook’s low of .10 CPM.
We also know that only 3% of Ning’s networks are premium networks that pay a small amount for services such as domain mapping, ability to run ads on their own network, etc. I’m gonna paper over that to simplify this (yeah, lame, I know. This is what we call PM math).
So to make 10 million dollars in revenue, Ning would have to do 10 billion annual page impressions. March pageviews are 71 million.
[...] had over $119M in funding. Are they profitable? No. Do they have any revenue? Yes! How much? Likely to be $1M. Crap! A company burning through a hundred of millions and having annual revenue of a couple [...]