If you’re one of the hundreds of thousands or even millions of people running an online community on Ning, it’s time to pull out your credit card or look for new digs.
The company announced earlier this week that the free model is going away. TechCrunch published the memo issued by Ning CEO Jason Rosenthal and I encourage you to read it. You may recall that I interviewed Mr. Rosenthal back in November when he was Chief Operating Officer of Ning and he had nothing but great things to say about the company’s growth.
At any rate, here is an excerpt from the memo announcing the changes:
…We will phase out our free service. Existing free networks will have the opportunity to either convert to paying for premium services, or transition off of Ning. We will judge ourselves by our ability to enable and power Premium Ning Networks at huge scale. And all of our product development capability will be devoted to making paying Network Creators extremely happy.
So there you have it. I’m sure it wasn’t an easy decision but I can assure you that many, many online communities are soon to bite the dust. The free model and low barrier to entry is what brought so many people to Ning.
The technologically challenged network owners probably have no idea where to look to even begin a transition. Their transition will likely be extinction, and as a community advocate I find that extremely sad.
Do you run a network on Ning? If so, what’s your plan? I’m sure that others will be happy to listen and learn.
7 comments
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April 24, 2010 at 3:54 am
Joseph Sunga
There seems to be an exodus from startup companies moving away from the “advertising model” which I think is a good thing. Days are gone when you could just create a website and hope to generate revenue purely just from advertisements.
There’s definitely wiki type sites that can definitely be a good alternative to Ning, but you never know when these sites will change their business model too.
Wetpaint: http://wetpaint.com
Wikia: http://wikia.com
April 24, 2010 at 10:03 am
links for 2010-04-24 « burningCat
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April 24, 2010 at 10:03 am
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May 23, 2010 at 1:53 am
Michelle
I know this is an old article but I must have missed it in the feed reader. I just wanted to mention that Buddypress is really reaching out to ex Ning users so that may be a solution for some. I’ve never used it as I’m a diehard Drupal fanatic but WordPress in general is supposed to be easy to use and Buddypress is supposed to be a fairly turnkey social networking site builder.
Michelle
June 13, 2010 at 2:23 am
Robert Kennedy
With ning no longer a paid service it inspired me to create my own social network. at http://www.serveandshare.com/networks. It isnt as nice as ning but it is free and always will be. I am experimenting with other scripts to create a much better site elsewhere. I think I may have finally found a script that will give me the features I want, If not I will eventually. In the mean time networks works just fine.
July 1, 2010 at 6:09 pm
Chat
I agree that a domain’s age is important. However, I feel there’s a very important factor that most SEOs don’t take into accoun
October 13, 2010 at 10:28 am
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