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 
- 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.
- 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.
- The MN platform is outdated.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)
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.