Sunday, April 18, 2010

Free Ning Services to end soon?

Visionary Art
Members of the Visionary Tribe





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A message to all members of Visionary Art


Please read this Ning blog for some disturbing news about the fate of free Ning networks:


http://blog.ning.com/2010/04/an-update-from-ning.html


In reply to this, I had added this comment to the blog (awaiting moderator approval, at the time of this writing):


I feel very strongly that you guys are shooting yourself in the foot!
Where did your premium customers come from in the first place, if not from the free start-up little networks that outgrew their bandwidth and storage space when they became successful and their memberships expanded. This, in the not too distant future, will be the case with my own network. At that point in time, it was planned already to add extra bandwidth.
But if you get rid of the free service, you won't have the start-ups that eventually expand enough to become premium customers! Was it not enough to get the google ad revenue from all these little networks? I concede, it is not much, but the potential of these small networks to start up and grow into premium revenue networks will have the rug pulled out from under them.
I would hope that sanity will prevail, and short term gain from slash and cut will be abandoned for a more progressive view of long term opportunities and building of an ever growing customer base, instead of what promises to be a stagnating enterprise gasping for breath.
Interestingly enough, I've seen sites go exactly in the opposite direction, making more of their services free as a basic service in order to atract a customer base to which innovative and atractive premium services can be offered.


At this point in time, I can only speculate about what is going to happen, but let me assure you all that I will do everything I can to keep this network intact. I had spent too much of my time and energy to build this network and the Public Gallery on weebly (which is fed by embedded content from here) to let anything happen to it.


In an e-mail to some friends I jokingly suggested that I am thinking about selling a kidney (preferably not my own) to keep the network afloat.


Seriously: we already have grown to a point where we would need premium services anyway in order to add to our ever growing collection of great art. Thus, additional storage and bandwidth would have to be purchased through premium services.


A solution will be found. It is not an insurmountable problem!
Otto Rapp

Update: check my follow up post "my 2 cents worth"

Additional information:
Ning: Failures, Lessons and Six Alternatives
Ning Fails at Free Social Networking

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