When Ongo launched four months ago, reviews from the tech press were frosty. Why would anyone pay $6.99 a month for a bunch of stories they could get elsewhere for free, the critics asked.
Now, having sampled Ongo and talked to CEO Alex Kazim, I get the potential appeal — though Ongo is clearly a product for old-school news consumers who have migrated online rather than for digital natives.
The site is backed by $12 million in startup capital from The New York Times, The Washington Post and Gannett. It also displays material from the Associated Press, Reuters, the Financial Times and other papers (most of those for an added fee).
I asked Kazim in a phone interview: Couldn’t someone view all that content, and more, with an RSS reader? “That assumes that they know what an RSS [reader] is and that they know how to set it up,” he replied. “That’s a super-advanced thing for many people.”
Ongo has two market segments in mind, Kazim continued: 25- to 45-year-olds who now do most of their news reading online, and older readers who prefer print but supplement that with a mix of websites.
The value is twofold. Stories are displayed in a readable format and without advertising. Given the clutter and high irritation factor of sites crowded with ads that drop down and move across the page, the reading experience is distinctly more pleasant.
Then there is the selection. Ongo’s content is determined by a combination of algorithm and a small cadre of editors. Readers get a sampling of a half-dozen or more quality sources without the labor of hunting through individual sites.
On my first visit (with a free day pass) I came upon a lyrical Thomas Boswell column from The Washington Post on the return of the U.S. Open to Congressional Country Club next month. The lead lifestyle piece was a clear-eyed look at the limitations and embarrassments of living with Parkinson’s disease, by retired Post restaurant critic Phyllis Richman.
Another day the serendipity was a long takeout by USA Today on misleading online resort promos. A different morning I was attracted to Reuters stories about diplomats’ sexual abuse of “the help” and a business story on Angry Birds, based on a conference presentation in Paris. Several of these stories were featured on Ongo’s section fronts, for lack of a better term.
Even if I were more of a custom-news, Daily Me kind of guy, I doubt I would have come across any of these stories. Most days, I don’t find time to scan the USA Today or Washington Post sites for stories that interest me.
The Ongo home page and news pages are updated through the day, though not as frequently, as a typical newspaper site or an aggregator like Google or Yahoo News. There is sparing use of blogs and video, and no commenting feature on stories.
While social media enhancements and further personalization are available (some free, some at an added price), Kazim told me, “The majority [of users] do not take any add-ons, and we do not hard-sell them on that.”
Will Ongo find enough takers to make it as a business? Kazim is not releasing any numbers yet, and I have no idea how big the market is. But suppose 100,000 people subscribe at the $84 annual rate. That amounts to $8.4 million in annual revenue – more than pocket change, but once you divide it six ways, a modest contribution given the scale of the participating companies.
Ongo is probably better understood as publishers’ attempt to have an entry of their own in the explosively growing roster of attractive, personalized aggregation products. Flipboard has been one of the clear winners among iPad apps, presenting a user with individually tailored content, presented in a well-designed format that is suited for the touch-screen.
More recent entries like Zite and Sulia, as New York Times digital chief Martin Nisenholtz put it in a March presentation, “feel a lot like a newspaper, right? And where does it [the content] come from? A lot is from the newspaper industry.”
The Ongo counterpunch makes sense in the context of paywalls that are being established by the Times and others, and in the industry’s rising interest in licensing content and charging aggregators something for it — notably in the News Licensing Group spinoff from the AP set to launch this summer.
The news industry has found it hard to coordinate collective industry ventures over the years. There have been successes, such as the copycat CareerBuilder counter to Monster, which is now a big and profitable business for co-owners Gannett, Tribune and McClatchy.
Nisenholtz observed in March that the Ongo founders “have a lot of wood to chop” before the venture can succeed and that the service “is one attempt, but not the only one” for legacy media to get proactive in aggregation.
Indeed, in recent months we’ve also seen a cease-and-desist demand to Zite to stop displaying full stories from several of the Ongo participants. (In response, Zite released a new version of its iPad app that changes how it displays stories.) Both the New York Times and Washington Post are involved in their own personalized online/iPad products (News.me and Trove).
Ongo may make more sense for more people a year or two down the road if paywalls block full access to much of this content, and if it offers unique material that other aggregators don’t license.
The Week magazine has proved that a well-curated (pardon the expression) sampling of news from varied sources is inexpensive to produce and can attract an audience. Ongo is not, and won’t be, for everybody. But in sitting out the battle of uniques and page views meant to impress advertisers, it could find a critical mass of followers without spending a fortune.
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