Ongo, a digital news aggregator launching in the US on Tuesday, starts life with promising credentials. Not only does Alex Kazim, its founder and CEO, come with a revenue-generating background as head of marketing for PayPal and then president of Skype, but its $12m of Series A funding came from the top of the US newspaper pile: the New York Times, the Washington Post and Gannett, owner of USA Today.
Kazim’s pitch is that Ongo will be “a personal news service”, designed around the user, rather than any one publisher. For a subscription fee – after a 30-day free trial – starting at $6.99 a month, it will serve up the best of top news brands from around the world in an interface offering full articles rather than just stubs and links, “editorial curation” and various customisation options.
As the news industry waits for the New York Times to unveil its own paid access model, any subscription news service is worthy of attention, and Kazim’s estimate that the 12 per cent of “avid news readers” who currently visit six or more news sites a day form an audience that can be persuaded to pay is not far off the view of some of the media groups now developing subscription models.
Rather than a repackaged Google News or yet another RSS feed, Ongo wants to be more like the Netflix of news, Kazim says. So automated story recommendations and selections from its five editors feature on the site, which does differ from many news readers in displaying stories in full, with their original pictures and graphics in a clean, readable setting. Ongo also boasts some nice sharing tools, allowing users to set up invitation-only “clubs” of their friends – fellow sports fans, family members or colleagues, for example – with which to share different articles. Recipients can read the shared article without hitting a paywall, but the sharer’s account is credited if a club member then subscribes.
But when Kazim demonstrated Ongo (accessible through any browser and – once Apple gives its approval – as an app), shortcomings were visible. A search on Apple, for example, yielded only the briefest mention of the blockbuster earnings it had announced the night before, and just one tangential piece on Steve Jobs’ recently-announced departure. Customisation tools also seemed rudimentary.
More challenging to Ongo’s claim to be “the complete destination for digital news” were the gaps in its content. Ongo has lined up about 50 titles, mostly local US newspapers, which subscribers can add to the basic $6.99 package for 99 cents or more a month (sometimes much more, such as $9.99 for the full Guardian offering). But the core package features only content from the Washington Post, USA Today and the Associated Press, topped up with just 20 stories from the New York Times, five from the FT and one other title of the subscriber’s choice. That may not be enough for the “avid news reader” Kazim has in mind.
While many publishers are looking at pay models as a chance to replicate the dual (subscription and advertising) revenue streams they enjoyed in print, Ongo is also launching with no ads. This may prove to be a selling point to the user, or it may leave Ongo struggling to compete on price with those with dual models. It will be interesting to see how long it sticks to its ad-free mantra.
No start-up looks perfect at launch, but the world is not short of news reader apps. Ongo’s backers have more work to do to distinguish it before it can hope to run any headlines about the news industry’s salvation.
