Ongo

Perhaps as a result of the less-than-enthusiastic response of surfers to advertising on the web, a new financial model has developed for publishers: don't sell any ad space, but instead charge your readers for the privilege of not seeing any ads. This is much simpler for the publisher, and gives the reader the sense that he's getting VIP treatment for his money. Whether there would otherwise have been any ads anyway, is irrelevant; just the knowledge that there won't be any now, is the teaser. This may explain why ongo.com, which officially launched yesterday after a not-exactly-secret period of secret testing, is apparently charging for a service which people normally expect to get for free. Seven bucks a month, in fact, to get a personalized choice of news articles aggregated from some of the leading daily news sources and with no ads to be seen. Most or all of the news may already be obtained in literally hundreds if not thousands of places around the web; aside from the most obvious sources, including the online versions of newspapers themselves, portals such as Google and Yahoo News offer their own selections and interpretations, and news services such as Reuters and CNN maintain extensive feeds straight to their readers' desktops. And this is not to mention the thousands of bloggers, individual and corporate, who all leap to their keyboards every day with their own paraphrases and polemics. Aggregation, bringing a large number of individual and often widely distanced and disparate sources together, is fundamental to the web experience; we couldn't hope to grasp the smallest fraction of what's happening out there, without it. And having a personal choice of services isn't new either, as many portals already exist to serve up information only on the topics of your choice. So what's the difference with Ongo? Aside from being ad-free, I don't think anyone's really sure just now. I guess you'd have to pay the $6.99 a month and find out. Maybe, just being able to shave a few fractions of a second off the time it takes to assimilate a page of news may be enough; there are some seriously stressed people out there for whom a second wasted is a step on the road to being outsourced. The other difference, is that Ongo happens to be the brainchild of the president of Skype, which may also explain why more than $12 million was raised in the first round of financing for this project. And there are some big names putting up their sponsorship and content, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, both traditional newspapers in search of new ways to secure readership while all about are losing theirs. I'm not one of those people who needs highly focused news, and I wasn't that highly supportive of newspapers in the past, but it will still be interesting to see whether the traditional media can find some way to hang on in a world which no longer has the time or inclination to read them. Aside from an ad-free experience, what would encourage you to pay for the news? By the way, Ongo is not a distant cousin of Frodo, Bilbo, or any other Tolkein character. I looked that up, first.