Some early observers of Ongo.com may be missing the point.
The subscription site, which launched Jan. 25, is intent on being a great “personal news experience.” While there are questions about readers’ willingness to pay for their news, especially when it is free elsewhere, Ongo is not trying to sell content.
Founder and CEO Alex Kazim explained in a phone interview that the start-up has tried to create a service that is smart and responsive. He described the basic $6.99 monthly rate as “not a paywall, but a paid alternative to a wall of inconvenience.”
Much of Ongo’s content comes from its funders. The New York Times Co., The Washington Post Co. and Gannett Co., Inc., chipped in $4 million each last year and they provide content. Others, such as the Financial Times and the Associated Press, supply more.
Kazim’s team has self-confessed news junkies with an orientation to online communities. Kazim has held key roles with eBay, PayPal and Skype, all of which rely on strong communities.
“So far, we’re pretty happy with the actual operations of the site,” he said Monday. “Typically, the problem most sites have when they launch is operational, and we have avoided all that. The site is performing well and, right now, we are going through and fixing things.
“We’re getting some great feedback through the forums about things they want to see and issues. The users really felt like they were a part of creating the site, so they were always very open. That’s a good sign of a budding community.”
Kazim said Ongo’s five editors have two primary responsibilities. First, they refine the ratings that an algorithm applies to content coming in from the partners. The editors use human news judgment to fine tune the algorithm’s rough cut. This especially is helpful when everyone is covering the same story. Human editors can ferret out the best or most original version of a story so readers don’t have to slog through repetition and duplication.
“The second thing they do is to look for hidden gems you probably wouldn’t get around to reading” and elevate them, Kazim said. Editors spotted the story from The Arizona Republic about the 58-year-old woman who was shot three times as she tried to protect Christina-Taylor Green, the 9-year-old killed in the Tucson Safeway shootings. Editors boosted the story up on Ongo, which is the Tongan word for “news.” Their judgments drive “Editors’ picks,” and help create the serendipity of the news-reading experience that takes you to interesting things you weren’t searching for.
The main way that Ongo hopes to help journalism and journalism careers is by capturing revenue through subscriptions and sending it back to the news companies as a new revenue stream.
“Revenue goes to the content licenser,” Kazim said, adding there is room to grow. “If I added McClatchy, they would get a revenue share back.”
McClatchy properties The Miami Herald, The Charlotte Observer, Fort Worth Star-Telegram and The Kansas City Star are available through Ongo now. One hundred thousand subscribers at the basic rate would bring in $700,000 a month. Kazim declined to describe how money gets paid out.
Because Ongo is a subscription site, clicks don’t matter. Subscribers on computers and tablets do. Kazim said not having an incentive to build click walls that require lots of drilling helps the experience.
“Even the guys who won’t put up paywalls put up high frustration walls,” Kazim said, referring not just to clicks and site navigation but the need for multi-sourcing readers to log in to several sites. At eBay, he said, fewer clicks for each user meant people found what they wanted faster. That’s Ongo’s goal too.
Ongo is aiming at a sweet spot in the market. The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press shows an audience segment of early adopters who get more than 90 percent of their news online, with a median age of 35, high income, high education and an interest in world news, business, politics, science and technology. A similar, slightly older segment gets about half of its news online.
Kazim said that’s “a large pool of people that you are shooting for and you really want people who are going to multiple sites and who like the convenience of having someone pulling it together for them.” Ongo lets them set up their own filters, clip stories into a virtual folder, forward what they like and form groups.
Will Ongo have ads? Kazim said “never say never,” but thinks they should not detract from the experience.
“Advertising is only useful if it is solving a problem for a user,” he said. “Until you are actually doing that, what is the point of an ad, other than getting in the way of a good user experience? Long term, that would be nice, but in its current form, advertising could be the last thing to do.”
Kazim said that the Internet has disaggregated news to the point where it is overwhelming for readers who want to manage multiple news sources. Ongo is trying to be a one-stop shop for managing the news.
“We really focused on that the user is not paying for the content, they are paying for the experience,” he said. “All of the curation and the tools are value added on top of what they would get if they went to a particular website. Users pay for free news on the Web now through their user experience. We think there is a better way to do this and some people will pay for a cleaner, better user experience.”
