• by Gavin O'Malley , Staff Writer @mp_gavin, September 21, 2011

Remember Ning? The social-platform start-up that, for a split second, people thought might reshape the Web? Well, Glam Media just bought it for a reported $150 million, mostly in stock. 

Regardless of what Ning is actually worth, the rumored sale price is way off its top valuations of $750 million, and, as TechCrunch notes, not much more than the $120 million investors pumped into the enterprise. 

"The sale comes after a rocky history for Ning, which bills itself on its site as 'The World's Largest Platform for Creating Social Websites,'" writes All Things D.

Mercury News describes Ning as "a social networking startup launched by serial entrepreneur Marc Andreessen that, despite his golden pedigree, has struggled to gain traction in the marketplace. That said, Ning's most recent plan to go all-premium didn't do half-badly. Since the shift about a year ago, Ning reports 400% year-on-year revenue growth -- going from 17,000 to more than 100,000 subscribers, and with 60 million monthly active users.

For Glam, "the Ning deal provides ... the opportunity to offer publishers tools to make their websites more social, such as blogs, photos, chats and buttons to post content on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter," Digits Explains. 

While Glam Media has enjoyed steady growth since its debut in 2005, its U.S. traffic has declined by about 10 million uniques per month over the past year, according to comScore. "So the acquisition of Ning will help in that regard," suggests ReadWriteWeb.

"One of the company's goals is to create social media brand campaigns that utilize Glam and Ning's technology," Mashable writes. And, as Reuters notes, "The combined companies will have over 240 million users and 100,000 publishers."