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?

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The look and feel is hugely outdated; the fact that one of the selling points of premium is the ability to edit your post is crazy!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

I agree with this. I've never bothered with most of the site, nor read the guesat bloggers, either. Haven't bothered much with the webchats, as they've usually been at a time when I'm working.

And that wage bill needs looking at. Do they really need such a big workforce? Are the numbers high in relation to other forums? If so, what is the difference? Can they outsource some stuff? And I think the whole IT setup may need to be looked at.

Cottonweary? Not yet more doxxing surely! Lordy

Evening, everyone. We're getting a lot of reports on this thread. We're going to close it temporarily to give us time to go through them all.

We've opened the thread back up now but just wanted to remind everyone that we don't allow personal attacks or troll-hunting on Mumsnet. Thanks.

Thanks @HebeMumsnet, it's good to see a company which can take criticism as it is meant - constructively.

I’ve appreciated mumsnet over the years and wouldn’t mind bunging a tenner their way via gofundme or crowdfunder or such but I wouldn't want to commit to a monthly or annual payment, nor share my bank details with a site where former employees have doxxed their users.

Hello all,
I've been alerted to this thread so thought I'd respond to some of the points raised in the spirit of openness and to explain our thinking

1. I did indeed say on the premium thread that by using an adblocker you're not really playing fair and I do in general believe this.

Any ad-funded publishing model relies on showing ads to pay for the platform and services. The truth is, if some people use ad-blockers, then that means other users will see more ads - which doesn't feel particularly fair. I take the point, of course, about Mumsnet users also generating content, and the value that posting brings, and of course that applies to everyone who's contributed to this thread but most people don't contribute - by far the majority of regular mumsnet users are lurkers not posters.

We've chosen not to be particularly aggressive about ad-blockers historically because we don't think we should deny people access to Mumsnet at the point of urgent need - so I thought it was worth mentioning - but it wasn't meant to be derogatory in any way and I'm sorry if it offended.

1. MN Premium doesn't offer much/ is too expensive. This is fair enough and something we admitted at the time of launch and which we're busy working on. The Premium offer is definitely a beta - we're very grateful to the folks who subscribed thus far, as we know they've taken a bit of a leap of faith (and made more of a donation than a subscription at this stage) but we're determined to make it really good value for those who sign up - so watch this space.

1. The MN platform is outdated. Again, this is a fair criticism and something we're painfully aware of. We've been working on transformation of our legacy tech (mumsnet is very large and very old) for over a couple of years now and we're really not far away from completion. We were gunning for July/August this year prior to Covid - and we still very much hope to complete the work this year despite having to furlough some of the team. The aim is to transform our platform into a fully modern one (for those in the know this means fully in the cloud, running on micro-services, with a rich UI and a unified code base) which allows us to develop, test and release the features users want quickly and without breaking things. It's fair to say we've neglected adding features over that perioud because we're going to be rebuilding them anyway, but you're right to call us out on that and we're looking at releasing some enhancements to the current platform soon (to everyone, not just premium members)

1. Our moderation is poor/ inconsistent. I don't actually think this is fair - we've always taken the decision to invest in professional mods and to respond quickly to user reports (unlike many of the bigger platforms). Of course you may not always like or agree with our stance and of course we make mistakes but we always try to admit them when we do - I believe our moderation is some of the best around and one of the chief reasons Mumsnet has grown to the size it is.

1. Our data security is poor. I posted about this on an earlier thread which is worth a read if you're interested in seeing the facts about what happened in the past:

We've had our fair share of security incidents for sure but I do believe there are a couple of mitigating factors and this narrative that MN is uniquely unsecure is just fallacious. For starters, I'm 100% sure that many sites and organisations have incidents about which you'll never hear. By contrast, we have chosen to be completely transparent and upfront with users about any data breaches, however small. Secondly, we are more of a target than most small businesses - my guess is that that's because we're somewhat famous for representing woman's interests but you might have your own views on this. I'm not pretending we've been in any way perfect on security and we have learned many lessons along the way - and we're cognisant that however secure you think you are, you can never stop being paranoid about it, but I think the suggestion that we're cavalier with users data is untrue and unfair.

1. We should stop paying (20k?) for blogs. I really don't know where this idea has materialised from but it's just wrong. We don't pay for contributions to Mumsnet forums and never have.

1. We're a financially mismanaged, bloated organisation, that pays our staff too much (and which is run by a dinosaur who ought to be put out to pasture ). This is something that I know has been going around on the 'other site' which keeps sending people over to us to spam/recruit and I think it's pretty unfair. It's not unusual for businesses to carry a bit of debt - many would argue it's a sound way to run a business under normal circumstances when interest rates are low. Our main cost is people - the more we have the more we can do. And we do quite a lot to try to fulfil our purpose of making parents' and grandparents' lives easier, aside from run forums. We run campaigns and lobby government, we run gransnet, we have a jobsite, we write editorial content (reviews, development guides etc) we are busy are re-platforming the site as said, and we fund all that mostly by selling advertising.

Our team are broadly paid market rates and I certainly don't feel ashamed about that. We need tech people to re-platform and post that to build features - anyone who's tried to hire tech talent in this country will know that 35k won't get you very far. Bear in mind that MN ran for years on a skeleton team from a back bedroom while we were growing and I didn't earn a salary for the first six years (and somehow seem to have come full circle now ) but we are now one of the top-10 most used web platforms in the UK so you'd expect us to have some staff. But I have to admit the ageing founder needing to be put out to pasture bit might have some truth in it .

Like all ad-funded businesses our revenues have tanked - I'm not sure many businesses predicted or prepared for this - and we now need to prepare for the fact that the collapse in ad-spend might continue for some time. So we've rolled out a subscription product that we very much hope will become compelling for folks over time. But if you can't afford it or don't like it then of course you don't need to subscribe to it - we're absolutely committed to keeping Mumsnet Talk free to use.

Sorry that's long and I hope it all makes sense. Big thanks as ever for your interest and your contributions.

That's shut everybody up

@JustineMumsnet thanks for taking the time to respond.

1. I think it's fair to want to use an ad-blocker when running ads means that the site slows down considerably. For people on limited data who are accessing via mobile, it's a huge difference. If the tech part can be sorted out then hopefully there's a happy medium here in the future.

1. Fair enough. Hopefully those who have already signed up will be able to give feedback on their experience, to help MN build a compelling offering.

1. That sounds really promising - and like it could be the solution to the advert problem. If it runs smoothly then I'm happy to whitelist MN in the interests of adverts supporting the site.

1. I do think moderation can be quite inconsistent. I appreciate that it's always going to be subjective though.

1. I'll take the point that there's been lessons learned. Perhaps the migration to a new platform will help with data security.

1. I'll stop writing a blog to pitch then

1. I think this is a tricky one. Clearly people would expect MN to be a fair employer in terms of pay and perks! Do the other areas of the site - apart from Talk (incl. Gransnet) generate that much traffic though?

BakedCam

It is indeed very long as Justine said herself, and there's a lot to unpick in there... re the adblockers thing though, that's surely what most people do on numerous websites. Having read recently - on here - about unsavoury ads that pop up, I'm not sure why most people dont use them.

And it is a fact that MN monetises the content that users generate - maybe not directly, but by alerting the DM etc to a thread that naturally pushes more clicks to here. Which all adds to the sell to the advertisers of course.

@yoloPenguinsEatfish

BakedCam

It is indeed very long as Justine said herself, and there's a lot to unpick in there... re the adblockers thing though, that's surely what most people do on numerous websites. Having read recently - on here - about unsavoury ads that pop up, I'm not sure why most people dont use them.

And it is a fact that MN monetises the content that users generate - maybe not directly, but by alerting the DM etc to a thread that naturally pushes more clicks to here. Which all adds to the sell to the advertisers of course.

We don't alert the Daily Mail to threads.

Question to Justine.

Have you furloughed any staff?

Can’t we just give a donation? I’d be much happier to do this.

Have you furloughed any staff

That’s clearly stated in the post at 17.15..

i think it’s quite petty to refer to mums chat as the ‘other site’ and complain about them spamming and ‘recruiting’. as the CEO of this site would you not be open-minded enough to accept that the internet is big enough for everyone?

i’m happy to spend time on both sites. i’m not sure what the perceived threat is from mums chat, and it feels a bit school-playground to even mention it in an otherwise-measured response to perfectly valid observations from people who contribute here.

That’s clearly stated in the post at 17.15.

Apologies

So the question is:

Why have you furloughed staff?

The 'other site' spams MN all the time, as well as trying to discredit MN by making up lies about it .Are you surprised Justine is a bit pissed off?

I'm pretty sure that if another site was spamming MC constantly, your Admin wouldn't be too happy.

Although looking at MC I don't think Justine should be too worried about the competition.

@helloPig the spamming was bloody irritating though- I reported some of the spamming as it was annoying.

I had a look at Mums chat and it looks like a cheap Mumsnet knock off. Why not make a unique site. Some of the threads were a bit like the MN trolls reddit page, lots of people acting all superior about how stupid mumsnetters are etc. All very tiresome.

I don’t use ad blocker but stopped using the site for a long time after flashing ads came on. I’m a migraine sufferer and it was too much for me.

Why flashing ads ?

I’m was drawn back due to covid and the staff room. So sad to see that mumsnet are not making stronger statements against the absolute bile being poured at us mums who are teachers. Pretty toxic currently and it would really help if mumsnet could come out in support of mum teachers who are juggling entirely new work and childcare situations and now being asked to forego safety.

I won’t pay to be abused by users and have no support

Grr. Just typed a long post and it's disappeared.
I won't be subscribing for several reasons :
The various data breaches /hacks, were not treated seriously atthe time, imo. A lot of minimising went on.
Moderation is, at best inconsistent and seems to depend on the evil of whoever is reading the report on a thread/post, rather than applying a consistent setbof guidelines. Especially the 'not in the spirit ' thread deletions.
Your salary bill. I am a governor in a reasonable sized primary school. Six months of your salary bill is more than our entire annual budget. Our budget has to cover all staff costs - teachers and support staff, all resources - books, pens, art supply etc, all utilities, first aid supplies, IT costs, training costs, upkeep and maintenance of a very old, leaky building, etc etc. Sorry, I can't get beyond the fact that you are asking for money to cover your salary bill, when we are on our financial knees trying to provide a decent education to over 300 children.