Ning to end free networks

[Josh]

Many of you may have heard the news that Ning, the providers of this community's social network, is intending to phase out their 'free' service, in favour of paid-for options. Jason Rosenthal, their newly appointed Chief Executive, said, in a staff memo:

"We are going to change our strategy to devote 100% of our resources to building the winning product to capture this big opportunity" -- i.e being the premium service, not the one supported by advertising. (Guardian)

It is interesting then that at the recent first meetup of digital content creators in Manchester ("There will be blood") the discussion around paywalls and the end of the 'free/freemium' model was debated. Now, we find ourselves very urgently coming to grips with this exact same situation. I'll blog my personal thoughts on this decision separately.

Why are we using Ning?

As I blogged about in January, the Social Media Manchester network was created on Ning by one of the regular attendees of the Social Media Cafe, Rob Gough, as a way of keeping the conversation going outside of the monthly meetups and to help facilitate the networking that happens at the event. Ning was picked because it was free to set up, easy to maintain and very easy to scale. It is undoubtedly far superior to the wiki pages used when the cafe was in its infancy. And, of course, its success is due in no small part to its adoption as the primary channel for communicating and promoting information about the Social Media Cafe; this remains a large part of its purpose.

However, since then, it has become a platform for a number of spin-off activities that originated from people who met at the cafe, including the Social Media Surgeries and the Manchester Aggregator. With over 500 members (that's double in three months since January), a number of events, groups and a growing blog network, I think that this site - the community it represents - has become an important part of the digital and creative media scene in Manchester.

What does this mean for our network?

The changes soon to be implemented by Ning will pose some difficult questions for the future. In his most recent blog post, Rosenthal says that we'll find out more on 4 May. He also recognised the difficulties that this move is going to present for volunteer-run communities like ours:

"We recognize that there are many active Ning Networks for teachers, small non-profits, and individuals and its our goal to have a set of product and pricing options that will make sense for all of them. For Ning Creators using our free service who choose to move to another service, we will offer a migration path and time to make that change." (Ning)

So the short story is, 'wait and see'. It may transpire that the new offering from Ning is compelling enough to consider some sort of payment to maintain this network and, if so, we would have to consider how this is achieved.

As mentioned, this community is entirely volunteer-run, as are almost all of the events featured including the extremely popular Social Media Cafe. This regular fixture regularly draws over scores of people from across the north west, and some big name speakers, but there has never been a cover charge or requests for sponsorship.

There is no proposal that this must change any time soon - though this type of change must be driven by the community. Undoubtedly, additional funding for the cafe, and therefore the development of this network, would be beneficial but this would also change the dynamic of the event and - in the case of sponsorship particularly - potentially require a number of strings that we would have to be happy to accept.

What next?

For now, I just wanted to let you know that we were aware of and thinking about how this change might affect the community. As ever, your feedback will help drive any changes and ensure that whatever decision is taken about the future of this Ning network or another solution is the right one.

Thanks to Daniel Bentley for flagging this up to me originally.

UPDATE: 2150 Ning has specifically stated that they're working on pricing options for education and non-profit network creators (NCs) that will "make sense".

What do you think? Does this network meet your needs? What ideas do you have about what should change to make it more useful and relevant? Leave a comment below or in the forum.

[Dave Mee]

There's a write-up of this here http://bit.ly/9RFsFb and grou.ps are offering an eternally-free (!) Ning migration path ( http://icio.us/echlmv ) .

A buddypress deployment may be an option - TANDOT could help hosting this.

Whatever happened to freemium?

[Josh]

But who would pay for this? Not just the cost, the time and effort...

[Josh]

Thanks to TANDOT for the offer of course :)

[Chi-chi Ekweozor]

Thanks for blogging this, Josh. Wow, that’s a big change.

Other things to consider:

*inviting the members of the community to pay the Ning hosting fee on a rotational basis i.e. sponsorship of the Ning for periods of time

If the Ning hosting/subscription fee is comparable to hosting a buddyPress site would this be attractive, Dave? I’d certainly consider Real Fresh TV sponsoring this Ning... but you can have first refusal :)

On a more serious note, I’d recommend we remained with Ning if only because the site has gained significant Google juice, as you’ve said so yourself in an earlier post, Josh.

In addition, you’ve got user inertia to deal with if we migrate to ‘yet another freemium’ site. I think we’ve just recovered from migrating things from the Wiki...

Finally, from my experience in running the Social Media Surgeries where a vast proportion of our 40+ (cumulative) attendees have signed up to the Ning just to RSVP for an event, people are willing to sign up because of the community already here.

Worth paying for the privilege, I say...

My tuppence.

[jonthebeef]

I think the best course of action is to go with Dave's offer. Self hosting is always preferential to a hosted service, and would offer the stability that the community actually requires. Freemium services are useful for a low number, however the popularity of the community function attached to #smc_mcr means a more stable, constant, and cost free solution is the way forward.

TANDOT - We'd be happy to partner up with you on a pro-bono basis to get this off the ground. It can then be handed over. Thoughts?

[Louise Bolotin]

I'm inclined to agree with Chi-chi. In addition to her suggestions, I'd be interested to see what the pricing options for community groups and non-profits will be. I reckon asking SMC attendees for 50p each month would probably cover the cost and any spare cash left over could be used to pay for other guest speakers such as Chris Taggart of Openly Local at future events. A win-win situation...

We really should try to stay on the Ning if we can. Moving should be a last resort.