Has someone at Ning been drinking their own Kool Aid?
Giving up on free and pushing prices on people who signed up for a free service – this just stinks of a CEO who lacks creative business thnking.
Looking through the comments on a lot of the articles about this “interesting” strategic move two things are clear:
- People understand Ning needs to make money.
- Almost none of them think that giving up on Free is the best way to do so.
So what to do?
Rather than charging for what was free, why not make their premium services better so they can justify the extra cost to those willing to pay???
Would successful Ning community builders not pay for extra features like facebook connect? (Ning haven’t offered this yet – but there sure is enough demand for it).
Or if improving premium features requires too much effort then there is always the option of (dare I say it) ramping up the advertising on the free sites. Ning communities are already paying to either remove the ads from their sites or to promote their community to other peeps. BUT wait, alienating free users could result in fewer places to host ads…oops, see ya later advertising revenue.
Making the assumption that 80% 0f their income comes from 20% of their users would the ning team not be better off focusing their energy on making their ratio more like 90:10 by just growing their user base? Get a few more $ from the big spenders rather than trying to have 100% paid membership and subsequently missing out on all the free trials that turn into wildly successful communities. If Ning CEO Jason Rosenthal really believes that he can create a $4 billion opportunity by charging all their current users, I wonder how much bigger he could grow his user base by simply focusing on making more communities successful?
iThnk the whole move seems massively myopic…what do uThnk?