Nieman Journalism Lab
Adrienne LaFrance reports that Ongo, the newspaper industry’s attempt to provide a personalized, curated news service, is shutting down after a year and a half. Ongo’s pitch was that it would curate stories from well-known news outlets (newspapers, mostly) and present them in a highly readable, ad-free environment, viewable on computers, iPads and iPhones. Founder and CEO Alex Kazim described the product as a “paid alternative to a wall of inconvenience.” Rick Edmonds, Poynter’s business analyst, wrote that it was “clearly a product for old-school news consumers who have migrated online rather than for digital natives.”
So what killed it? LaFrance writes that the service was “hurt by a confusing pricing model,” with a basic subscription — which started at $6.99 a month and dropped to $1.99 — providing some, but not all, content from major news sources. She notes “that many of its news orgs have chosen to focus on building their own paywalls.” Another obstacle was Ongo’s lack of in-app purchasing, a decision apparently tied to a reluctance to give Apple 30 percent of such transactions.
Ongo’s not the only product that has had trouble figuring out its pricing. News.me, a personalized content app powered by users’ Twitter connections, started out as a subscription product (99 cents a week or $34.99 a year) but later became free.
Nieman Lab collected some of the early reactions to Ongo’s launch in January 2011; now it’s time for everyone to write the “I told you so” posts.
