Thanks for taking the time to personally reply. It’s nice to see that you guys care about what your users say.

I guess that you have a fair point that you can’t control the type of Google ads that appear on educational Nings. Some of my colleagues from the Webheads group also felt that “there is no such thing as a free lunch” and the ad-supported Ning sites were better than nothing. However, I do think that many adult education establishments (like the private language school where I also work) would be totally put off by the type of ads that were appearing on the Ning site we’re using for the “Images for Educators” series of training sessions.

At the end of the day, it’s Google’s fault, not yours. However as Google are providing a service for you that is seen by many thousands of users per day across your networks, I wonder if you are not in a better position than other educators to bring this up with Google and ask them if there isn’t something they could do to help you and us.

Surely “clean” ads will only lead to more Ning users and more ad revenue or possibly even more paying Ning sites?

Thanks again for your reply,

Seth.

I appreciate your blog post and wanted to respond personally.

Unfortunately, we have no control over the Google Ads that are served on the social networks on Ning. Given this, we offer to remove the ads on education social networks on Ning (Grades 8-12) for free. Just contact us in the Ning Help Center and we’ll remove the ads (http://help.ning.com).

If you don’t fall into this category, we also offer the ability to remove ads or run your own ads for $24.95/month, which – compared to other services – should be perceived as quite reasonable.

If there’s anything else with which we can be helpful, by all means let us know. We want you to LOVE your new social network on Ning.

Best,
Gina
Ning CEO

Well Ning, the gauntlet has been laid down, let’s see what they say.

Best,

Seth.