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 fireguy on April 28, 2010 at 3:30pm: Good run while it lasted. Change can be good I guess.

Comment by Tara on April 28, 2010 at 3:30pm: Great find Greg, thanks!

Comment by truth on April 28, 2010 at 2:52pm: Thanks Greg, looks interesting.

Comment by truth on April 26, 2010 at 3:14pm: The former pitch in donation banner indeed hit its goal of a 1000 dollars.
We have spent about 400 of it and except that a full detail report will be made available soon.

We have added Fearless broadcasting to our goals / projects . Its creation came after the decision to move off ning.

The podcast hosting is monthly and thats where some of the donations have been spent. Other items such as domain name registration, a subscription to a friendly site, and a few other odds and ends is about it.

Goal one is moving and hosting the site on its own server.

I also would like to have 3-6 months paid in advance for ning premium hosting to keep as a back up until the new site is up and running properly.

Most of this new server move requires a tech expert and I hope we will be able to offer some what of a reimbursement to them being this time consuming project. We will also need a person to do weekly or perhaps monthly maintenance to keep the site operating smoothly.

I am no expert in this field and any help would be great..

Comment by I811st on April 16, 2010 at 6:33pm: Special Offer: web site hosting for Patriots....

http://www.augustcorp.com/alfcontact.html

Comment by I811st on April 16, 2010 at 2:09pm: Oh well, looks like it's time to find a new network site. No big deal,the internet is big and vast .There's other fish in the sea. Moving off of Ning will never happen if It hasn't happened already, Unless "transitioning" means they're giving you two years to do it, cause the last one wasn't enough. Fuck this place.

Comment by Tara on April 16, 2010 at 7:29am: Wow, this sure explains a lot of the BS we've been experiencing here on 12.160 lately! Nothing like forcing us to do what we already planned to do in the near future. Ning doesn't deserve any of the sites money for sure. It's time to make the big move and transfer 12160's plethora of info to a whole other bigger but better blog site hopefully sooner than later. It will be that much better for all of us in the long run. Screw Ning!

Comment by LeAnne on April 15, 2010 at 8:00pm: My plan is to expatriate from the corporate U.S., repatriate back into my country/nation/state, and watch the illegitimate and usurping gov. die a natural death.

Comment by LeAnne on April 15, 2010 at 7:58pm: The communists are the capitalists, and the capitalists are the communists.

Comment by Harry Thomas on April 15, 2010 at 7:53pm: you think things are bad now , i see everything getting worse , this is just the beginning of the "phasing out" of the internet as we know it. Gina was on charlie rose sounding so optimistic about the social networking future. We now see she was just blowing steam up everybodys ass.

WELCOME TO THE BEGINNING OF INTERNET 2

The Internet as we know it is dying RIP (cant say im surprised as we have been duly warned for a long time)

Personally Im not investing in the internet as a future Ive been saying for a long time the Infowar's future is in our own backyards . We must collect the information we need now to share with our communities .

Mark My Words And Remember You Have Been Warned !!!

Peace my friends ,
Harry

PS. anybody from central ny are please lets stick together and network while we still can