To not ‘pay my way’?

[LeLavandou]

By not paying for Mumsnet Premium and using an ad blocker. Is that ‘not paying my way’ as Justine Roberts suggested on the MN premium thread in Site Stuff?
Does this make me a freeloader, if I still use MN and just block the ads? Given I only use the talk boards where content is produced by users, where does this stand in the MN freeloader stakes?

I'm in two minds.

I want the feminism board to stay alive, its a fantastic resource.

But I read on another thread that Justine is paid/pays herself £25k a month. And in general the staffing costs are huge, and I don't read the blogs etc at (apparently) £20k a pop so I'd like to see a cost cutting exercise in conjunction with the paid site option.

The easiest way to stop people using adblockers is to have much stricter controls on the ads you accept and where you place them. No gifs flashing around, nothing that hides actual content, no music/video.

I’m not sure why it’s considered getting ‘people riled up’ to question MN’s decisions. And I’m pretty sure no ones going to rush off to Netmums because of this thread.
Anyway, I’m not interested in other sites, I’m interested in this one and whether people are happy to pay for premium or not, not outlandish conspiracy theories.

As regards the 20 k a pop blog, is that what MN pay bloggers to blog on here, or what companies pay MN for them to sponsor their product blog?

This.

Really, how big can the cost base of an internet forum be?

well according to one of the early posts, they have a salary bill of something like £350,000 a month? I cant find it at the moment, but its a bloody joke

When I said this, i thought I was quoting this post from Mucklowe:

I'll consider paying when I know that MN won't ban me for calling a male rapist/child abuser "she".

But I'll add that this site is incredibly difficult to use. The emojis, quote facility, edit and emphasis functions could really do with some updating.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/site_stuff/3874618-Mumsnet-Premium-membership-please-support-us-if-you-can

"Yes - we have lots of fixed costs - mostly staff and server/hosting/Saas products. Our monthly staff bill is 350k so any dip in revenues hits the bottom line pretty quicky. Put simply if we don't cut costs/ generate sufficient revenue we will soon run out of cash."

I don’t use an ad blocker as I’m not well up on them.
I don’t read the ads, I don’t take any notice of them.
I’m a bit cynical as I think there were maybe plans afoot already for a premium type thing? Wasn’t that long ago that they started placing ads in the middle of threads rather than at the bottom, was annoying at first but now used to it and just scroll on by,
So I’m not going to pay for premium but also not going to use ad blocker as can happily live with the ads and mentally block them!

I don’t know why people are surprised about the wage bill.

You have many people to run a site like this, from IT staff, to administrators, to advertising sales people, to financials (payroll, managing revenue etc) to moderators, to supervisors and to managers.

It’s not like you create a website and that’s it.

@Bluntness, because other sites (I'm specifically thinking of Ravelry) run on small staff teams, certainly less than 10 people. And I am certain that they are not all being paid £35k a MONTH. £350k suggests to me a staff of around 100 people. And that, I'm afraid, is ridiculous.

You have many people to run a site like this, from IT staff, to administrators, to advertising sales people, to financials (payroll, managing revenue etc) to moderators, to supervisors and to managers

Indeed. They have a large number of IT staff, which makes one question why they’re not more efficient in terms of improving functionality.

I wonder if they're making use of the furlough scheme?

I’m not surprised at them having a hefty wage bill, but 350k a month is a helluva lot considering the capability of the platform and the quality of moderation. Time to tighten the purse strings.

I suspect they spend a lot of money on MN content, guest blogs and web chats (and facilitating all that) but the reality is people don’t come to the site for this. So they could scale that all that down significantly and it would barely register.

The irony is that it's the Talk section that generates the most interest and attention - both from users and press/advertisers.

Talk is what prompts webchats in the first place - look at how many times MN has made the news.

The look and feel is hugely outdated; the fact that one of the selling points of premium is the ability to edit your post is crazy!

Scrap premium. Strip out the guest bloggers and parts of the site that people don't look at - MN should have oodles of click data on what draws people in. Refine the number of topics in Talk - it's hugely unwieldy. Take a long hard look at how running adverts impacts on user experience and sort out these tech issues. Once you've done that then identify some key advertisers who fit with MN and then once they are onboard, make it a requirement for users to whitelist the site.

I am happy to whitelist sites who have adverts which feel organic to the page. No flashing nonsense, no irritating pop-ups - done well then they are fine.

@MarieQueenofScots I've had some dodge ads like that I've reported them on site stuff and they've always thanked me and got rid of them

Mumsnet forums are not that user friendly, you can't quote which is really annoying. Also, on the app there is no 'page' function so for really long threads with hundreds of comments you can't jump to a certain point.

I click on the adds to support Mumsnet. It is only very rarely a product that interests me.

@MarieQueenofScots. I can only presume they're stuck with an old and bespoke (possibly poorly coded) system which is a ballache to change...