Ning is laying off 40% of its staff and dumping free versions of its service. That’s a shitty day for the people who lost their job and the folks left behind without their coworkers. I went through a few rounds back in the dotcom days and fun it was not.
But I can’t help but be puzzled by the coverage of this. Here’s TechCrunch on the situation:
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. 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.
Are you kidding me? The company has blown through $120MM of VC funding over six years, built up massive traffic, yet just had to slash and burn, and you’re saying that “traffic growth is no longer good enough”. How the hell was it ever good enough?
Ning’s problem is not a lack of eyeballs but its inability to turn them into cash money to pay the bills. Getting more of something that’s a net-negative is not going to make up for it.
That was always their problem. From day one. Just like it’s any other business’ problem. Acting all shocked and surprised now is just incredibly ignorant of our industry’s very recent past.
This is the same kind of ignorance that goes on to celebrate so-called businesses successes before they posted black numbers on the balance sheet. Until that happens it’s all conjecture and possible maybes.
The just-give-it-away-for-free-and-they-will-come-and-we’ll-be-rich automatron is as broken now as it was in 2001.
UPDATE: Just found this fantastic piece of cheerleader reporting from Business Insider from just last year: “Build-your-own-Facebook startup Ning is still on fire… How much money is Ning making with all that traffic? Bianchini wouldn’t comment. But by our back-of-the-envelope calculations, Ning could be on a nearly $10 million annual”. Oh boy.
Richard
on 15 Apr 10Insane how we value unprofitable companies over the profitable. Here’s another story on the differences between Foursquare and Where. One is profitable and the other not so much http://on.wsj.com/bYbHlR
Bryan
on 15 Apr 10Isn’t this Andresssen’s MO? Loudcloud never made money, then the downsized it to opsware, did not really set the world on fire, sold it to HP and now it buried away as some hardly seen HP service. Obviously the guy is smart when it comes to engineering, but business wise?
Eric Fleming
on 15 Apr 10I blame this on you guys, you should have written Rework in 2001.
Sean McCann
on 15 Apr 10Ning has always blown my mind as to why people thought it was so amazing as a business. It could have been a decent product if they simply focused on premium networks (ones they can charge for) from day 0. They could have also created a more intelligent freemium model.
It’s just sad for the smaller networks who worked really hard to build a community only to hear that it will be destroyed unless they pay money. It makes people lose faith in putting a lot of effort into building something on somebody else’s platform. Sad day for people doing it the “right way”.
Jacob Gorban
on 15 Apr 10You mean that they should Get Real and Rework their business idea, right?
Related, just today presented my old startup idea to a friend of mine. After I told him he asked “where’s the revenue going to be from?”. We’ve both read GR and I read Rework. So I just made a little laugh by saying “ads, obviously”. And we dumped the idea.
The good thing, I first had this idea about 6 years ago and never acted on it for several reasons. Now I can totally dismiss it, from business point of view and focus on what I do best at this moment and what brings the money – developing and selling Mac software.
Andrii Ponomarov
on 15 Apr 10TechCrunch is a yellow press.
Aditya
on 15 Apr 10Jason,
Are you disagreeing with advertising as a legitimate business model? (eg. Plentyoffish) or saying they should’ve only raised exactly as much as they needed to get to profitability, knowing exactly how they would get there before they raised cash?
Also, saying that they’ve “blown through $120MM of VC funding over six years” is hardly accurate unless you know they’re broke for sure. Maybe they’ve figured out how they’re going to make money and are just doubling down to get to profitability with the remaining cash in the bank?
Melvin Ram
on 15 Apr 10Took them long enough to realize that. I think if a company were to simply save $120MM, they would be considered a gigantic success.
Stack Exchange is now headed in the same direction: http://mixergy.com/stack-exchange-joel-spolsky-interview/
It’s definitely possible to profit from the model they are trying to pursue but it’s really easy to take your eyes off the ball when you have that much runway. Hope Joel and gang don’t make the same mistakes.
Colin
on 15 Apr 10Bold to call out Scoble, @ev and @ginab. @markpinc and zynga are making money though… and not just revenue – profit!
Mihael Konjevic
on 15 Apr 10In croatian there is saying that could be literally translated as “It is easy to hit thorns with other people’s dick”. I believe that it is pretty appropriate for this situation
DHH
on 15 Apr 10Aditya, plentyoffish has a couple of employees and a gazillion hits that runs off cheap hardware. No venture funding, just profit. Ning had 168 people, $120MM in VC, and no profits after 6 years.
Also, if their bank account was still flush with cash, it’s not very likely that they’d take such drastic measures so quickly. They’re on Series E funding for crying out loud.
Karim A.
on 15 Apr 10I agree with your post in general, but curious about something. Ning has free plans and paid plans, just as 37signals does. The free plans were ad supported, and they decided to kill those plans off and focus on the paid plans. It’s not like they only had free plans and now they finally realized that they needed to start charging people. I think your post is a bit misleading in that way.
RM
on 15 Apr 10Maybe the same we’ll say about Twitter in few years…
Josh B.
on 15 Apr 10I dunno, weren’t the free versions of Ning all ad-supported? One of their premium options is “ad removal”.
I would love to hear a Signal write a post on their take on free/teaser accounts vs. ad-based revenue vs. a subscription model, but this post is definitely not that.
Melvin Ram
on 15 Apr 10@Mihael Konjevic – lol ouch
Muhammad At-Tauhidi
on 15 Apr 10Fred Wilson would like to have a word with you.
JR O
on 15 Apr 10Works for Google.
DHH
on 15 Apr 10JR, that’s exactly the problem. The eyeball model has worked extremely well for Google, so everyone thinks they can duplicate it. They forget that it’s not just Google’s eyeballs that makes it work but the fact that their users are uniquely interested in clicking on ads via search.
And no doubt a handful of other high-fliers might make it. Perhaps Facebook is one. But that’s still very poor lottery chance odds for a business strategy.
Justin Chen
on 15 Apr 10To DHH’s point about advertising/plentyoffish – you can definitely have an advertising model if your cost structure fits within it. You just have to be realistic about what it can support.
Spencer Fry
on 15 Apr 10Amen!
paul
on 15 Apr 10amen!
hop
on 15 Apr 10Looks like they spent $5 of their $120MM on their homepage UI – http://www.ning.com/
Richard B.
on 15 Apr 10Interesting. Saw Fred Wilson speak today at Behance 99% Conference. It did seem to me that in the cases he made reference to his definition of success was related most closely to achieving funding. I don’t remember the word “profit” mentioned.
Lee
on 15 Apr 10Eyeballs is not a business model. My good man fitty cent has a Ning site that is ad supported I wonder if g unit will have to upgrade…
Having been in this game for about 15 years I remember being courted by multiple dot coms and I would always ask the same question “what is your business model.” the funny thing is CFO’s and CTO’s would answer by telling me how much funding they had…
I feel bad for the ppl who got axed.
Jaryd
on 15 Apr 10@Karim A: Like DHH said in another comment, Ning has 168 people and $120MM in VC, while 37Signals has 16 employees (I believe), and almost no VC. Plus, 37Signals actually makes profit. Ning could have realized this was coming a few years ago.
Mihael Konjevic
on 15 Apr 10I believe Ning actually realized that they’re going nowhere, but they took the money so ride could last longer
Lee
on 15 Apr 10I love how they tell ppl to go viral! Lol… 1 in a million shot.
MikeTek
on 15 Apr 10What a joke.
There’s a movie theater near my house that used to have a fake “exit” door painted on the wall at the end of a hallway. I never understood it, but always found it hilarious. What if there was a fire and people were running frantically at that wall?
The exit strategy for most of these eyeball startups is going to start looking painfully similar.
Andy T
on 15 Apr 10I can’t be the only one who hasn’t even heard of this company before now.
Anonymous Coward
on 15 Apr 10StackExchange anyone
Victor
on 15 Apr 10Quoting Ning CEO, in that Business Insider article David posted:
“About 12,000 social networks pay for Ning premium features, spending about $55 per month. (This sounds high, but ok.)”
12,000 x $55 = $660,000 /mo $660,000×12 = $7,920,000 /year
not counting the income from ads
isn’t this a lot of revenue?
Tim
on 15 Apr 10Phil McTimoney
on 15 Apr 10Tangentially related: I think Twitter’s announcement that they’re building their own url shortener might be good news for Bit.ly. They’ve been able to build a reputation, and now Twitter might take all of their non-revenue-producing volume and leave the ‘pro’ bit that makes them money.
In effect, it’s the same move that Ning just made, but without annoying customers.
Traveler
on 15 Apr 10It seems like a lot of people, especially VCs, still think being big is better than being profitable. I personally know at least 30 people making a good living from content or community websites that people value. Most of them only have one or two employees and some freelancers. How come they can be profitable after a few months but the guys who get venture money always seem to blow through millions before they realize there’s not a burning desire for what they offer?
Anonymous Coward
on 15 Apr 10“isn’t this a lot of revenue?”
Revenue don’t mean shit. Profits matter. They had 5 separate rounds of funding – it doesn’t sound like they can make enough money to cover their expenses.
Jacob
on 15 Apr 10David – you do realize in your Update – that business insider is funded by Andressen right?
Eric Timmer
on 15 Apr 10One of Nings problems was it’s a PIA to find their paid services. Yes it’s easy to sign up for your own social network, but hard to find the “See plans and pricing” button. Not sure if many people would pay for Ning but if they made it easier to find the dam button…They might actually find out
Cody
on 15 Apr 10Looking at the Ning homepage, it’s almost as if they’d prefer people to be freeloaders. There’s no sign of “pricing” or “upgrade” or “premium accounts”.
PJ Hyett
on 15 Apr 10@Victor $8M/yr isn’t nearly enough when you employ 167 people.
Steven Walling
on 15 Apr 10“Ning’s problem is not a lack of eyeballs but its inability to turn them into cash money to pay the bills.”
Absolutely. Here is a company doing free the correct way, BTW.
andrewnim
on 15 Apr 10@Victor Not when you have blown through 120 mill in 6 years its not. One thing I would love to know, how much has Facebook spent so far?
RB
on 15 Apr 10Pud, where are you now, when we need you?
Scott Thompson
on 15 Apr 10I wonder how much profit Google made out of Ning’s ads? And how many advertisers who may have been interested in advertising on Ning were put off by the fact that premium communities had paid to get rid of the advertising?
If ads are there to drive people towards paying to avoid them, then everyone loses; advertisers, consumers and publishers.
Steve
on 15 Apr 10Read www.mises.org for an understanding of truly “free” market economics. Especially relevant is how the Federal Reserve printing press creates economic bubbles that lead to this nonsense. An even more obvious example is the bubble the Fed created in the housing market that made some people believe that if they bought a house and lived in it for a while it would magically become more valuable! David is right on with his common sense approach to value.
Fahim
on 15 Apr 10Facebook has raised $700+ million. They’re also the largest website in the world so I’ll give them that.
Jim Gay
on 15 Apr 10Preach on, David! This can’t be repeated enough. Thank you.
Nwokedi
on 15 Apr 10It is possible that Ning’s business assumptions needed a longer time to play out. I think it’s easy in hindsight to say “ha, they should’ve focused on profit.” There are smart people Ning. I’m sure profit was an end goal. Ning’s laying folks off & focusing on premium products is a “pivot” in Steve Blank/Eric Ries parlance.
Anonymous Coward
on 15 Apr 10Why do we assume there are smart people at Ning? What is so smart about following a model that after $120MM in funding and many years giving it a go leads to laying off 40% of your staff?
Nwokedi
on 15 Apr 10@Anonymous Coward, you’re right. The people at Ning are stupid and you should’ve been running the company.
Designslave
on 15 Apr 10Reminds me of the old SNL Change Bank skit:
“How can you make money doing this? The answer is simple. Volume!”
http://www.hulu.com/watch/2315/saturday-night-live-first-citywide-change-bank-2
Nigel
on 15 Apr 10Also surprised that as a ning user this is the first I’ve heard about it – not from ning themselves
Tim
on 15 Apr 10Another timely (for me) and great post. Made me think.
I’ve launched a social site (based around finding/reviewing awesome coffee) with an iPhone app coming.
I never built it to draw revenue (though that would be nice), but more because it solved MY own problem and thus I knew it would solve others’ problem.
Now, having bootstrapped and spent around AUD5k thus far, I am starting to think “what is my revenue model here”. Even “is there a revenue model?” And even “SHOULD there be a revenue model?”.
Answer: yes – Advertising (targeted geographically and relevant, using some custom software I am having made) and some other ideas.
So when I read posts like this and see comments like [Jacob Gorban 15 Apr 10 ] it makes me doubt myself, but DHH makes the valid point that relying on advertising is fine if it fits your cost model (it does, all I pay for is dev work and hosting, and my wage from my “real” job easily covers this), ‘tis cool.
Anyway, this a prescient lesson, methinks: don’t ever rely on advertising. Ever. Seeking survival from a micro tip jar doth not a great business model maketh.
Another fantastic post and awesome discussion from everyone here.
phil mctimoney
on 15 Apr 10160 staff @ 100k = 16M per yr
Add a few mill for datacenter costs, plus rent
Twenty mill a year, easily.
So 8 mill is a start, but if they were profitable we would know about it.
Cindy Gallop
on 16 Apr 10First off, Mihael, I LOVE that Croatian saying. Could you email it to me in Croatian at [email protected]? I want to start using it forthwith, and I think it’ll work even better if I say it in Croatian first :)
I have a huge issue with the 2 knee-jerk responses to the question in the tech arena, ‘What’s your business model?’ Knee-jerk reaction no 1: ‘Advertiser-funded.’ I come from the ad industry, and I can tell you there aren’t enough advertisers to go round all the ventures who say they’re ‘advertiser-funded.’ Knee-jerk reaction no 2: ‘No business model.’ Build it, they will come, and it’ll all work out somehow. I’m an old-fashioned girl. I conceive my business ventures around business models designed to make money from day 1. Shock horror, how old-fashioned of me :) But I recommend to everyone else that they do the same. And Yes, I fell upon ‘Rework’ with cries of joy and have already informed Jason and David that I wish to marry them and have their babies. Both of them.
MarcD
on 16 Apr 10Ning has been doomed ever since FB launched Pages, and even more so since FB Connect.
Anonymous Coward
on 16 Apr 10@Victor
$8 million annual revenue with 160 employees = $50K per year per employee. If the employees make $100K per year that’s a $4 million annual loss. That’s no business model.
Tony
on 16 Apr 10$120M? that kind of money is mind boggling to me for a startup web shop. How are other companies suppose to compete when they’re bootstrapping? The amount of VC dollars has completely distorted the web market, and made it hard for anybody to get a ROI. They’re never recoup that much money, and they’ve raised the bar so high for other self-funded companies that it makes it almost impossible for them to break even too.
Phil McTimoney
on 16 Apr 10@Anonymous Coward: If they’re only paying their Silicone Valley engineers $50k, that would be their first mistake :)
EH
on 16 Apr 10Ha ha, Richard@1, that article says nothing but blather about “Where” (who?) being profitable. When the rubber hits the road, they decline to state $$$. Oh, but they have user growth, big whoop. Yet another VC driven yuppie calling VC undershoot as “profit.” Onlyest thing missing was a mention of EBITDA.
And Scoble is a charlatan, this generation’s John Dvorak. Per above criticism, I’d love to see a graph that compares TC/Scoble coverage to company lifespan. Kingmakers in their own minds, that crowd.
MarcD: FB ain’t the be-all end-all of this stuff. Ning was never a contender, illustrated by their performance so far. Their numbers say nothing if not that they bought into The Eyes Model hook, line, but not (yet) sinker. They need to be the leopard that changes its spots (or at least sloughs off a bunch) at this moment.
Todd
on 16 Apr 10167 employees * $100K = ~ $17M/year. With $8M in revenue, that leaves them $9M/year in the red.
If they had 167 employees from day one and zero revenue, $120M would last 7 years.
Assuming their headcount ramped up, and at some point revenue did as well, $120M should last quite a while even losing $8-9M per year.
They could easily be playing it safe and trying not to crash and burn. But if they’re broke, where’d the rest of the money go?
Tim
on 16 Apr 10I don’t know if it’s fair to say Robert Scoble is a charlatan, he does make the odd useful insight.
@Tony, I agree, 120 million when you ought to be bootstrapping is mind boggling.
Makes my bootstrapping on
@Cindy: would it be fair to say, sometimes you build a Tribe (to solve your own problem) and a sustainable revenue model (acceptable to your tribe) becomes obvious as you grow? Not a “STICK YOUR HANDS UP MTHFKERS” bait and switch (free for a while, then a “now we’re charging” job), but a truly “this costs me a lot to run, we’re introducing unobtrusive ads” (Godin: Ads are the new tip jar).
-timbo
Battie
on 16 Apr 10Great conversation here.
I built ezboard’s Yuku.com a few years back. Yuku was very much like Ning. In fact we built it just around the same time. In any event, we had 15 people developing Yuku and after moving ezboard there we had ~500K communities on it. At our best we achieved less than $1 eCPM…and we worked hard to achieve it. With the large volume and small team we had were profitable. Rev share never worked though - in the end our community managers wanted 100% of the revenue and to rent the platform. Not a great way to get big revenue and pretty high friction micro managing rev share relationships. Plentyoffish has it right - small team, big volume.
Ning, the size of the team and money raised was a bit of a mystery to me in 2005. We were kinda jealous at the time I have to say. But, with all that, we had hoped that they would have figured it out and made a success of user generated communities. They still may be successful, but it is going to take some creative thinking and luck. Not sure that the new plan of a non-freemium model is the solution though.
Good luck Ning!! Creating a 10x on $120 million will take luck and more.
Dignan
on 16 Apr 10@Todd More like $200k a year in Silicon Valley once you include benefits and other per-employee overhead.
And employee salaries are far from the only cost for most businesses.
Fernando Emmanoel Borba
on 16 Apr 10I think that bubbles are everywhere.
At least this new CEO has the gut to blow this bubble before it’s too late.
Reality check is all that matters even for successful businesses.
Tina Mammoser
on 16 Apr 10THANK YOU! I love this little review and have even posted a link and my own POV on an artist forum. So many people in my field concentrate on views/hits/hearts on online trading venues when to me it seems of little value unless we can’t link those numbers in any way to converted sales. So it’s not just the big co’s taking this ridiculous approach to analyzing their business start-ups.
(I posted here http://www.etsy.com/forums_thread.php?thread_id=6495274 in case you’d like to read it from a very small biz perspective)
Charlie Evett
on 16 Apr 10Taking VC money generally commits a company to a 1 in 10 shoot for the moon strategy, because that is the model that most VCs operate under. There is a huge amount of luck involved in this. Of course the Ning guys are smart, but they still needed some very good luck.
I think the main problem is that easy money frees one from having to seriously evaluate the “if I build this feature it will return X in revenue” questions. So VC backed companies keep adding more and more, thinking “if we can only make the product Big enough it will make money”, because piling on more engineering lets everyone keep their jobs.
As for Facebook, well, yeah, it’s Facebook’s world, we just live in it. They are the big winners of the social web sweepstakes. Having become the Gorilla of that market, where for most people they simply define the category, they cannot be beaten with incremental features. They can only lose to the next generation, which for most of us living in the here and now will be impossible to see coming.
Getmehome
on 16 Apr 10How the hell does Ning require 160 employees? Surely they could get by on 20???
5 engineers 5 other technicians 3-5 in sales and marketing 2 accounts 2-3 in business and admin
Helmuti
on 16 Apr 10I know from wikidot.com (another more or less comparable “social” network org with free sites and hosting and payable accounts) – this is a dangerous step to switch to paid services only. But the differences are this comp holds only 3-4 employees and not more than 100…
I cannot beleive that Ning really thought to overlive with such business plan.On the other side – the CEO made the neccessary cut now.
Nick
on 16 Apr 10@Getmehome I think that’s what they’re finding out and the reason for the layoffs. Maybe not 20, but downsizing is their solution. I agree with the ideas floated around here that the premiums need to be marketed better as well as charging your heavy hitters more than $55/month. That’s pittance for someone really using a social network to it’s full potential. Some celebri-tweets are $10,000 ea and just go out to a million or so followers.
Anonymous Coward
on 16 Apr 10Fast Company article from May 2008: “Here’s something you probably don’t know about the Internet: Simply by designing your product the right way, you can build a billion-dollar business from scratch.”
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/125/nings-infinite-ambition.html
Guess there’s more to it than that.
Cory
on 16 Apr 10The fact that they had 160 employees would immediately throw the red flag up for me.
160 employees?? Doing what???
If you can’t take 120MM in funding and create a profitable model, why do you think you can now fix that same broken model?
John
on 16 Apr 10It’s almost as if we’ve taken a time machine back to the early internet bubble days – things like eyeballs and EBITA positive are meaningless!
This is like Mugatu’s line in Zoolander:
“Doesn’t anybody notice this? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!”
Anonymous Coward
on 16 Apr 10The demise of Ning does not surprise me one bit, what is SHOCKING though is that they would need 120M in funding. WTH are they doing with all that money?
Hugo Rodger-Brown
on 16 Apr 10Am I alone in thinking that Ning only got so much money because of the effect a meeting with Gina Bianchini had on the VCs?
Srinivas rao
on 16 Apr 10You know in many ways, I always think that part of why we study history is to keep it from repeating itself. It amazes me that 10 years after the original dot com boom/bust we’re actually doing it all over again. 120 million dollars? Sounds like they really overestimated what was possible.
Justin Matthews
on 16 Apr 10I have had 2 emails so far of bloggers dropping Ning. One was a rather well followed blogger as well. I know managing something like Ning is a huge undertaking but I can’t believe that traffic is not important. Their total demise will be soon if that is how they continue to run things.
Chad
on 16 Apr 10Facebook? Twitter?? Sounds like the social media bubble is beginning to burst.
Michael Jung
on 16 Apr 10Hey @dhh!
I should have made a bet on one of the betting sites the day the @Ning news broke. You are so predictable, something like this breaks, and proves your values, principles, believes how to build a business w/ profits. It’s here to read about for sure.
Again, a bag of sand (in case of @Ning w/ Mark Andreessen more like 10.000 sandbags) for the foundation of your empire @37signals ;) ... against the Dark Empire (NVCA) and its Lords of Finance. ;)
PS: Yep, I bought ur book and read it. And please keep the ball moving forward w/ 37signals.
-MJ
Tom O
on 17 Apr 10Guys, I love your products and the service you provide is top notch. You’ve made it!
But please, please, PLEASE stop dropping the “f bomb” and other such language in your posts. You don’t need it to appear that you’re keeping it real. We respect what you’ve done…OK?...your choice of words just diminishes your accomplishments. Please.
@Tom O
on 17 Apr 10Interesting, not sure where u see an “F bomb” anywhere in this particular blog post or any of the comments. Perhaps you meant to post your comment to a different post that used such terrible, heart stopping language. My suggestion… when you see such a post, don’t fucking read it.
Tom O
on 17 Apr 10Relax bro, I must have been off by one post (feel free to pass along to your colleagues there)...anyway, I’ve always been impressed by your company’s services…very professional, with a lot of thought given to everything you do. Either you don’t give much thought to your blog posts (which I don’t think is the case)-why not say it was a “bad” day rather than a “shitty” day (now I’m doing it)- or you believe you need to use such “terrible, heart stopping language” for some reason. It just doesn’t fit with your corporate (professional) persona. That’s all. Either I’m right or I’m wrong. No big deal really.
Len Feldman
on 18 Apr 10Ning had a tremendous number of dormant and dead free networks. Early on, the company played up the fact that its network count was exploding, but didn’t pay attention as to whether or not they were actually being used. Pages that weren’t viewed didn’t generate advertising revenue, so they became a dead weight.
A few months ago, Ning started pruning the dead networks and found that its free strategy was a complete bust. People started sites on Ning and then either abandoned them or joined other sites with much higher traffic.
The second problem (among many) was that Ning never got spam under control. Ning put responsibility for policing and removing the spam on the individual network managers, but the managers complained that the volume of spam overwhelmed anything that they could do to get rid of it. That drove another group of networks to other sites with centralized filtering.
One of the most discouraging things about this is that Andreessen Horowitz is out there touting “fat startups”, exactly the model that both Loudcloud and Ning followed. Both companies resulted in costly pivots and big layoffs. Is the real lesson of “fat startups” that when you make a mistake, always leave someone else holding the bag?
@BarringtonArch
on 18 Apr 10so true. do either facebook or digg turn a profit yet, or are they still burning through cash?
Lana
on 18 Apr 10Their CEO was a complete bitch, she was so cocky and had no idea what the heck she was talking about. If it weren’t for Anreessen, they could have not been able to raise so much money to blow on bunch of stupid videos they have on their site. They hired bunch of idiots from Oracle and MobiTV to run the show, good luck with that. Their MO was fire drill, yea that gets a lot of work done.
John Jaworski
on 18 Apr 10Great business lessons.. The big one…
Traffic aint anything without conversion….
Jamal
on 18 Apr 10i thought u use RoR at 37signals http://37signals.com/whyjobs.php
.php??? wtf…..............
Andrew
on 18 Apr 10@Lana, were you recently laid off of a job with, let’s just say, Ning? Yikes.
KickApps, a Ning competitor in their early days, was able to trim the fat and remove their long-tail quite a while before it became a problem. They’ve raised no-where near the 120M that Ning has raised, and run a staff of around 50-60.
mcdavis
on 18 Apr 10@Jamal -
It’s just server rewriting. It does a redirection of the browser (called a 301 redirect) for when .php and .html are added to the end of the landing pages. My guess is in case people included the popular extensions they’d still have the landing page available.
Notice both:
- http://37signals.com/whyjobs.php - http://37signals.com/whyjobs.html
will redirect to http://37signals.com/whyjobs
Alex M
on 18 Apr 10This is ridiculous. COME ON! Business has been on the web for a decade now, and people still don’t understand that there are only two ways to get revenue from a website:
1) Sell stuff (goods/services). 2) Sell ad-space.
It’s that simple. Traffic is just a means to an end. It’s funny to watch VC company after VC company squawk about traffic constantly, yet never see the bigger picture.
David Andersen
on 19 Apr 10I haven’t even heard of this company.
Jamal
on 19 Apr 10@mcdavis – you r right, its just a redirection :)
thank u
Reuben Swartz
on 20 Apr 10At first, it seems like Ning lacks a strong value proposition, a well-targeted market, and a good pricing strategy. Until you realize that the customer is the investment community.
Liam Forde
on 20 Apr 10Always a sad day when passionate people who believed in something lose jobs. Families, dreams, financial stresses.
Lets hope they come back stronger and ultimately create all those jobs back and more.
It must be tough for everyone left too.
Thanks Ning for going for a dream.
This discussion is closed.