Ning says it’ll shut down its free social networks
This is a bit of a stunning move by Ning which has, for years, offered free hosting of social networking sites.
Mathew Ingram of Gigaom today quotes new ning CEO Jason Rosenthal as having…
…“taken a hard look at our business in the 30 days since I became CEO, and I’ve decided to focus the company 100 percent on our paid networks business.” Rosenthal said that the free part of Ning would be phased out “soon,” and that existing networks would either have to convert to paying for the premium service or “transition off Ning.”
Here are four Ning-based sites visual journalists might frequent:
1. The NewsPageDesigner portfolio site:
NewsPageDesigner was created in 2002 by Tim Frank, now of the Sun Sentinel of Fort Lauderdale, Fla. It was shut down by its host paper in Maine and then reborn as a Ning site and partnered with the Society of News Design in February 2009. It currently has 1,799 members.
Tim replies to our query tonight:
Although it’s a good idea to prepare for the worst, I’m not inclined to panic until I learn more. Will keep you posted as soon as I get more details.
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2. Newspaper Designing, a site open to all visual journalists but one that aims at news designers in India:
Newspaper Designing was launched in January 2009 by Iam Sajeevkumar T.K. of Kaumudi in Kerala, India. It currently has 246 members.
T.K. Sajeev tells us:
This is bad news this morning. I am a free client of Ning. Everything is free in my site. And, as you know, the international competition itself is free.
We are in a growing stage. This will be a big blow.
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3. Most likely not affected by this change is VisualEditors.com. [Full disclosure: This very blog, of course, lies under the VizEds umbrella.]
VizEds was created in 2004 by Robb Montgomery of Naperville, Ill., as a bulletin-board-type site. It converted to a Ning social networking site in January 2008. VizEds currently has 3,565 members.
Robb replies tonight:
Visual Editors has always been a premium customer of Ning, so I doubt our board will recommend any sudden moves. However, Ning’s sudden shift to a paid focus does open the discussion for members about how the non-profit should respond.
How can the Visual Editors charity best serve you with online resources? Is there a better alternative that we can offer the community of visual journalists than Ning?
The charity is always looking to improve the environment where where it can serve members with effective peer-to-peer training resources. Please feel free to contact me if you have something to contribute to the evaluation process.
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4. Another popular site that will likely not be affected: Wired Journalists, devoted to collaborative study of the evolving field of online journalism:
Wired Journalists was created in January 2008 by Ryan Sholin, Howard Owens, and Zac Echola. It was acquired by Publish2 last August and currently has more than 3,800 members.
Ryan writes:
Thanks for tracking me down. I’ve been following this closely, and every hour or so, someone seems to tweet “Oh, what’s going to happen to Wired Journalists?”
The bottom line is that we’ll be fine, and we’ll keep the network running.
We’ve been using Ning’s “premium services” on and off, so it’s really just a question of where they draw the “premium” line under new management. If it’s reasonable, we’ll certainly stick with them.
Ning’s staff have been supportive of Wired Journalists in the past. We’ve been featured on their blog and on the Ning.com homepage as well, regardless of the small amounts of revenue the company has pulled in from our network.
If the definition of “premium” becomes something a bit more shiny and Hollywood-budget friendly, then yes, Wired Journalists will find a new home. When Ning launched, they were certainly the quickest, easiest way to start a social network of your own without a shred of coding knowledge of your own, and they’ve done a great job of keeping their offerings current, adding Twitter and Facebook integration lately.
But there are few reasons why an enterprising journalist with a little bit of Web development experience couldn’t migrate their user data over to a new network, built, for example, on the Django-powered Pinax Project.
In all honesty, Ning’s growth seemed like it would be hard to maintain — it’s always felt like a bargain. We’ll see if the pricing structure changes and make a decision when there’s a bit more information publicly available.
April 16th, 2010 at 2:55 pm
Ning’s making a terrible business decision by doing this.
There’s already a pretty obvious parallel to be made here. Back in 2004, Moveable Type decided to limit the number of sites the free version of its software could be used on, which caused a huge uproar in the blogging community. That uproar led to the success of the open-source Wordpress, which has pretty much left MT in the dust ever since, even after Six Apart moved back to completely unlimited personal versions of the software back in 2006.
I noted this on SFB today: http://shortformblog.com/tech/how-ning-could-learn-from-moveable-types-licensing-folly
If I were these groups, I’d look into alternatives. Ning just cost itself a lot of goodwill.
April 16th, 2010 at 2:57 pm
Though, honestly, I dislike Ning… I feel like the sites are often more complicated than they need to be for what they are. I visited NPD and VizEds way more when they were on their old, more focused architectures.