Ning Kills Free Web Sites! The Days of Free Ning Are Over

No word yet on how much network creators will have to pay to stay on the service.

The Days of Free Ning Are Over - Cuts 40% Of Staff

This is not a good sign.

Will ning go broke, be absorbed by google or facebook?

We at 12160.org have slowly but surely planed on moving off ning for good.

We could use your support by donating to this endeavor .

More on the announcement

One month after long-time Ning CEO Gina Bianchini was replaced by COO Jason Rosenthal, the company is making some major changes: It has just announced that it is killing off its free product, forcing existing free networks to either make the change to premium accounts or migrate their networks elsewhere. Rosenthal has also just announced that the company has cut nearly 70 people — over 40% of its staff. Here’s the email Rosenthal just sent out to the company:

Team,

When I became CEO 30 days ago, I told you I would take a hard look at our business. This process has brought real clarity to what’s working, what’s not, and what we need to do now to make Ning a big success.

My main conclusion is that we need to double down on our premium services business. Our Premium Ning Networks like Friends or Enemies, Linkin Park, Shred or Die, Pickens Plan, and tens of thousands of others both drive 75% of our monthly US traffic, and those Network Creators need and will pay for many more services and features from us.

So, we are going to change our strategy to devote 100% of our resources to building the winning product to capture this big opportunity. 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.

As a consequence of this change, I have also made the very tough decision to reduce the size of our team from 167 people to 98 people. As hard as this is to do, I am confident that this is the right decision for our company, our business, and our customers. Marc and I will work diligently with everyone affected by this to help them find great opportunities at other companies.

I’ve never seen a more talented and devoted team, and it has been my privilege to get to know and work with each and every one of you over the last 18 months.

We’ll use today to say goodbye to our friends and teammates who will be leaving the company. Tomorrow, I will take you through, in detail, our plans for the next three months and our new focus.

Thanks, Jason Rosenthal

Ning’s announcement also says that it will be giving network creators more details in the next two weeks.

While the email talks about Free versus Premium paid networks, Ning actually has a variety of different premium upgrades. Currently, Ning’s premium options include support (which has a $10/month and $100/month options for different service levels); Custom domains ($5 a month); Extra storage and bandwidth ($10 a month); Ad removal ($25 a month) and the ability to hide any trace that you’re running on Ning ($25 a month).

As a result of today’s news I suspect we’ll see quite a few active networks jump to whatever the cheapest premium option is; I don’t expect Ning to make it especially easy to port their data to a different service. There will also certainly be a backlash from Ning’s vocal community of Network Creators, many of whom have invested quite of bit of time building out their niche networks.

While the massive layoffs are obviously a big hit to the company, it isn’t all bad news for Ning: the service is still seeing its traffic grow according to comScore (see graph below). But traffic growth is no longer good enough for the company — it needs to start generating some serious revenue, and advertising clearly isn’t cutting it. Ning has raised around $120 million, getting valuations of a half-billion dollars in April 2008 and a reported $750 million last summer.

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Comment by Tara on July 29, 2010 at 1:48am: Thanks fireguy!

We don't plan on being on Ning too much longer, but of course as all things go time is of the essense. It is going to take time to develop the other site so in the meantime we need to keep the ship afloat. All donations will be used for staying on Ning for a few months and also the transition off of Ning which will cost us some buckages too.

It's all a work in progress!

Thanks again Fireguy, we appreciate the help!

Comment by fireguy on July 29, 2010 at 1:06am: Send me a message with an address and I will mail a check if we are going to be here for a while.

Comment by Tara on July 29, 2010 at 12:51am: Hey all members of 12160......we have enough money to pay for two more months on Ning because of one SWEET member Swtnlovabl, WOOT! Thank you, Thank you, and Thank you some more! Also thanks to all that have made a donation or are planning on making a donation. All your help is greatly appreciated!

We will certainly keep you all updated on the future site move. As I've stated before, there's a lot of work going on behind the scenes to make this so! All in good time, all in good time!

Comment by morris108 on July 21, 2010 at 4:25am: http://ninginc.createsend2.com/t/r/l/mnklk/dhhdxkhr/y

this is the link to nings pricing page

Comment by WTRH-AM-AE on July 20, 2010 at 11:03pm: I cannot afford to keep the network that I created open. So I backed up the content and pdf ed the pages, that I created for memory lane. I think it's google trying to take over the network. Ning is going to lose some really good content we really remembered. I am buying an external HDD soon like one that is 500GB, and I will be really doing some backing up. Everything I see on the that will come and go, will be backed up using pdf formatted pages. Firefox offers 2 good apps for firefox called Download Helper and Print2PDF. There is another good app for Windows called MWSnap

Comment by Tara on July 20, 2010 at 5:15pm: Thank you Sweets, we sure do appreciate your help! As Pat stated, we will post a blog soon to break down the how, when and what will be needed in the transition off of Ning. In the meantime, we will be paying for a few months on Ning until that all happens.

Thank you all members who are willing to pitch in, you're the best!

Comment by Swtnlovabl on July 20, 2010 at 3:31pm: I would do a Month also......just let me Know what plans are.... now we just need 10 more !

Comment by truth on May 11, 2010 at 10:24am: Hey cool fireguy. I will let you know. And PH, sunlight on our spending ok with me.

Comment by fireguy on May 11, 2010 at 12:44am: I would be in for paying for a month's worth if we can get 11 other people to pledge to do the same.

Send me a message James and let me know what you plan to do, keep the site or go elsewhere.

Comment by truth on May 10, 2010 at 10:57pm: The new ning pricing guide is up. It turns out that this site will cost $50 USD a month as of July. This is based on the amount of storage , for example we have 14 gigs of pages here.

Not sure if there is going to be tax or other charges on top of this.