The story as told over at BoomTown is that Ning wasn’t looking for funding, but Lightspeed Venture Partners wanted to participate in Ning’s funding because of Ning’s amazing growth and Ning was okay with it because they liked the idea of getting dough from a high profile VC like Lightspeed.

Win-Win.

Please take our money, we know it’s only $15 million but please take it.  Okay for you, we’ll take it.  We don’t really need it, you know.

The new $15M investment brings to $119M total funding taken by Ning — remember the founders of Ning are Marc “Mosaic – Netscape” Andreesen and CEO Gina Bianchi.

Who says the bubble has burst?  The new funding round makes Ning’s valuation a whopping $750M.

So far for Ning, monetization has meant advertising — they’ve been using Google’s platform, but are working on their own.  They also charge some modest usage fees for customizations like using your own domain name for you Ning network.