Current status of the Ning Platform is always available on the Ning Status Blog.

Hi everyone!

Finally, we are happy to announce that beta-testing for the Paid Access on the Ning 3.0 platform starts today, October 10!

We have assembled a group of volunteer networks that will test the Paid Access feature which can help you monetize your network.

There are lots of community blogs on our platform, so the first thing we decided to do, is to release functionality that will let you monetize a blog post, an article, or a group of posts or articles. As a network creator, you will get advanced settings to set a price, periods of time your paid content is available, and also to set the visibility of the content for different groups of users.

By the way, if you also want to pitch in together with the beta-test group for Paid Access feature, just leave your network name in comments or contact me directly via email: kyryl.glushchenko@ning.com

At this time, the functionality is 100% free for the beta-test group and for everyone who will join it in the coming days. Note, that after the group finishes the testing, the payment terms will be changed.

And, some good news is awaiting all the Ning network in November: a Donation feature. It will be available on Ning 3.0 platform and will help support non-profit and especially charity communities on Ning.

Stay tuned!

Sincerely, Ning Team

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  • orderregister.com contact@orderregister.com

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    Order Register Business Ecosystem. Fashion and Technology wearable technology smart fashion.
    • Hi there!

      Please check your email box, or the private messages here on creators :-)

      Best wishes,

      Ning Team.

  • Hi there Ning Team,

    I will be interested in reconciling my expectations for this feature with you. We had a PAY WALL feature offered somewhere around 8 years ago, and as I understand it was discontinued during that time when Mode Media decided to scrap the main product and features in order to rebuild the platform from scratch to be mobile responsive. Other features along these lines like audio and video file uploads with branded media players were also discontinued - but Ning customers were informed these features would be redeveloped for the mobile responsive 3.0 version in a relatively short time, which proved to be untrue.

    You should be able to appreciate the concern of network creators such as myself who bought into the idea of being able to create our own social networks with such features, how we invested in our own businesses based on these tools being essential parts of "our" products to "our" network member customers. As social media companies, losing our proprietary advantages of audio and video hosting (outside of YouTube, etc), as well losing the credibility that comes with independent white label branding (clear of shared branding ideas like Powered by Ning) - kind of made charging our network members for access a non-viable option.  

    Now, the better part of a decade later, it is great to hear these features are coming back online, however these raise serious concerns for those of us who are serious business users. I will tell you I did not stand for the abrupt discontinuation of these features, nor the false promises of development in work. I had to dig and probe into what was really going on behind the scenes, and my sense of what the root causes for these problems were included the following issues which remain unaddressed:

    • Audio/ Video | Mode Media legal team decided there was insufficient control/ monitoring of user media uploaded and hosted through the Ning platform such that the company could technically be held liable for pornographic abuses or copywrited content, and that having made a strategic shift to claim all web traffic visiting creator sites and viewing such media, that it was in the best interest of Mode to discontinue the video and audio hosting altogether. Furthermore, from a technical standpoint, my impression was Ning was also encountering server side challenges in terms of hosting sheer data and bandwidth issues, that it was too costly, subjected the system to greater crash vulnerabilities, and was easier to go with the conventional trend at the time of just embedding from media hosting services like YouTube.

    • Pay Wall | The idea of managing financial transactions between Ning Creators and their customers was very problematic for Mode. Just like the audio/video features were dumped and reframed to NC's as available via embed, the pay walls were discontinued under the guise creators could easily embed their own PayPal apps. Well, what is wrong with sending Ning Creators' member customers to a reputable third party transaction portal? Well, some of it depends on how much people actually trust a tool like Pay Pal, perhaps the associated charges that come with the transactions, or possibly the notion a business should be able to present it's own payment processing options to customers - that is a real reputable business, be it online or not, generally demonstrates some measure of credibility as a legitimate business when it directs customers to create a payment account in its own so called proprietary application - vs. the cheap alternative of something like Pay Pal that is accessible to virtually anyone online, and that has been in many cases copied by scammers and other criminals looking to get a hold of naïve people willing to offer their credit card info, etc. My impression was Mode had interest in payment processing and financial transaction management, primarily as a tool for incentivizing and paying select content creators to advertise with Mode Media partners - not really as a feature to support NC's to do business with their own customers. You will probably find a lot of Mode content creators on the web ranting about how bad Mode was at paying them in a timely fashion for their work, and the fact is probably that many never were paid at all when Mode started to collapse, so it was not a surprise to see the pay wall feature suddenly dropped and put way way way on the back burner.  

    If you don't address the issues and concerns that were underlying the discontinuation of the features in the first place, then how are we supposed to have confidence in them?  How do we know you have really thought them through from a legal, technical, and practical business standpoint. Those of us who have been with Ning as a platform and company from the beginning have seen numerous business models, changes in ownership, and ongoing promises to get all we want - we've had audio, video, and pay features, and they've failed or been taken away from us. It makes it very difficult for us to use the platform as businesses, and for what I have invested waiting for the product to come "back" around to simply what it was 10 years or so ago, I'm not interested in seeing adjusted pricing for these "new and improved" capabilities built on my dollar.

    Best, Anthony

    • Hi, Anthony!

      Thanks for the questions. Regarding the embeds and bandwidth, as I know the embed code doesn't reduce amount of data transmitted over the website as anyways the video for example is getting displayed on your site and this piece of information has been obtained by the user from your network, so it doesn't matter whether the file has been uploaded to the network itself or embedded embedded if it's getting uploaded from your site. So I do suppose their main concern was the amount of storage space used, or maybe the restriction put by CDN and their policy, I don't know exactly as I'm wasn't here as long as you do :-) However, the legal part could be the case as when you embedding the file technically it's not based on your servers, but according to the DMCA you have to remove the links as well, and the embeds are basically the links, so... 

      Regarding the content on the network, in order to reduce the risks there is the limit on the size of the video that could be uploaded to the networks, as basically movies which are getting spread over the net without the permission of the rights owners and they weight much more than just 100 Mb. Regarding the audio, in order to reduce the risks there was the decision made to let only network creators and admins to have the ability to upload files on the network, for now. However, we do understand that the members should be able to upload audio as well, but we wish to put more control on that (not ours control, the control of the network creator), however it would be come possible only with the release of the MRS (member ranking system) when NC will be able to provide some members with ability to upload their audio files to the network. In my opinion this should reduce the risks.

      But anyway, we are cooperating with the right holders and if the content has been uploaded with out necessary permissions we would have to remove the content itself and notify NC that such situation has occurred, so the owner of the site could take the necessary actions in order to prevent these issues in the future.

      Regarding the Paid access feature, in the end of beta there would be possible to use two gateways Pay Pal and Stripe (as we have seen lots of the requests to make it possible to integrate Stripe here on creators). We do know that these two options could be not enough and we have already received the feedback from one of our beta testers to add another payment gateway, so we are planing to increase the number of supported gateways, what, we hope, would make the paid access more convenient to use for different members. And it's only one example, basically the beta has been started to gather users' feedbacks regarding the feature and see what could be changed on our end in order to make functionality more convenient to use for the end user, but unfortunately the 2/3 of beta testers probably joined the beta to simply test the functionality, but as I'm writing here in this post I would like to say thank you to everyone who has contacted me back during beta with questions, suggestions and ideas, your contribution is highly appreciated.

      Best wishes,

      Ning Team.

      • Very nice response Ning Team,

        I will just reiterate there is significant difference between "embedding" and "uploading" media. Of course, in both cases you are displaying a given media item on your site, and in both cases a platform service provider such as Ning may claim to offer such "functionality" with regards to media display capabilities. So you might look at the user's demand to display media on their site, see that they can upload and get embed codes from video and audio hosting sites, and then direct your development efforts toward supporting embed on networks across different browsers and devices - which can be more or less supported and done better or worse - but it is still not the same thing as a proprietary media application.

        Let's say that I or a customer of mine produces audio or video media for my network. I can propose a significant value to them in being able to upload to my platform service / site, that the media can be displayed, attributed to, and tracked directly via my site, and very importantly that the media be displayed distinctly from the widely available and free youtube etc, players but as an extension of my media company's brand. In case you do not know, Ning used to offer this. So, say my site is a social network and social media publishing platform niche themed for a region - I can sell media space to businesses who want to promote and connect in that area - and they recognize the value in uploading to my channel and providing a media view experience to our regional audience branded around the channel and not something like YouTube. Technically you could just have them upload to YouTube and embed on site, but then you aren't really providing the kind of online service product and value that comes with a real media company, it just becomes something any amateur with a free blog can do, and therefore you will find your chances of running a viable media business significantly diminished.

        The same will be true of the paid access feature. Just a note for those who have not been around too long, but Ning used to offer this feature as well. Again, you can create a "portal" page that integrates a Ning front-end with some payment processing service like Pay Pal on the back end, and of course this can also be supported better or worse, but to claim you have developed the capability for Ning Creators to accept payments might be an insult to intelligence. You can say that setting up access to certain media, pages, or site areas based on whether or not a user of a given class pays is the feature - but to be honest, those kinds of capabilities were easy to create our own workarounds for when Ning had the pay walls in the first place. I can agree the built-in capabilities will be useful, just like the ability to "upload" multiple "YouTube" videos into a sorted channel page, but I think it's ultimately a superficial capability.

        Personally, I want my customers to upload their media to my regional niched channel feeling they have access to a valuable media platform that my business controls, that supports the credibility of their business in the same way I am asking Ning to do for me as the service provider I pay for, and like I set up my account through a Ning branded payment processing window and see as much on my statements, I want my business customers to set up their accounts through my business... and be able to do so because Ning offers media hosting and payment features to my business like it started to and said it would nearly a decade ago... it's not rocket science.

        I do like the effort to address my concerns with at least some intelligent responses though. Nice job Ning Team and thanks.

        Best, Anthony

  • I would love to join the beta group.  My network name:  thrive.ning.com

    • Hi there!

      I've sent the message to you please check your private messages here on creators, or you can reply om the email that I have sent.

      Best wishes,

      Ning Team.

  • holapuertorico.ning.com

    • Hi there!

      I do remember you have sent the private message regarding this network, I'll send you the questions once again please check the private messages here on creators.

      Best regards,

      Ning team.

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