To think most of you don’t know Mumsnet are now requiring acceptance of cookie tracking or payment to use the site?

[OldChairMan]

… as MN have only posted in Site Stuff:

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/site_stuff/5268190-introducing-pay-or-consent-on-mumsnet?utm_campaign=thread&utm_medium=share

Many will click on “Read for free” without realising that this is a change in the site’s terms.

“Hello everyone.

We wanted to give you a heads-up about a change in the way we deal with cookie consent. We are introducing a Pay or Consent model, giving you two different options to continue accessing the site:

• Continue for free with cookies and ads: this is the option that most people have enabled already.
• Subscribe to Mumsnet Premium: For those who prefer an ad-free experience with no cookies/tracking for ad purposes - Besides ad-free you’ll also get first access to our product tests plus all revenues from Premium are put towards our campaigning work

Why are we making this change?

The pay or consent model is becoming increasingly common across online platforms as publishers adapt to changes in advertising levels and data privacy regulations. Like many other publishers, we relied on advertising to generate income but changes in tracking regulation and the growing use of ad blockers have made this model less viable.

We know that Mumsnet is an essential space for many - a place to seek advice, find support, and connect with your fellow Mumsnetters. That’s why we’re committed to ensuring that the site remains free at the point of use for anyone who needs it but it’s not fair that those who install ad blockers or rejected cookies are piggy backing on the back of other users who haven’t.

At the same time as introducing this, we’re going to reduce the price of Mumsnet Premium to £2.99 a month because we want to be fair to those who’d rather not accept advertising cookies. This is less than the cost of a flat white a month from most decent coffee shops and we very much hope you think Mumsnet’s worth it! Nb anyone who’s signed up to Mumsnet Premium already at the previous price (£4.99 per month) will have their payments reduced within the next week or so.

We’ll be here to answer any questions you may have. Thank you, as always, for supporting Mumsnet.”

I'm curious...how much do you think hosting and maintaining a site like this costs, along with the cost of complying with all the modern legal requirements?

To be fair, MN AREN'T complying with all the modern legal requirements. That'll save them a bit.

That's because they haven't come into force yet. Given that the deadline is about 5-6 weeks away, and there's at least three months' worth of management, development and legal work involved in it, I'd say there's a lot more going on behind the scenes than can be seen from here.

It's ironic that MN were instrumental in the calls to make the OSA a reality, and are likely to be among the first casualties.

However, to go back to the main point...just hosting a site like this is astronomically expensive. Let's put some numbers on it with some napkin maths...

I run a forum that's got about 40k members, with 50k unique visitors per month and about 2 million page requests per month. That costs me about £150/month for hosting on bare virtual servers and offsite backup storage, and I don't pay anything towards maintenance because I do it myself.

From a brief look at traffic analysers, MN gets at least 100 times as much traffic as that, and the requirements for hosting sit significantly above the linear when it comes to scaling up that far. However, using a straight line as a baseline (and doubling it, because they won't be using bargain-bin hosting like I do), that would put the hosting bill alone at around £30k/month (£360k/year), plus a bare-bones team of at least three to develop and maintain the technical architecture (conservatively, around £75k/year each).

That's £585k/year, which in all likelihood represents the lower bound for the real number, and doesn't include any of the management and legal overheads, or content writing and lobbying etc.

Worse, the advertising revenue from forums is much lower than most other sites, because algorithmic ad managers don't like people spending too much time on one site - it runs out of relevant high-value ads to show pretty quickly the longer one spends browsing around. This is also typically a very lean part of the year when it comes to ad revenue - Q1 and Q2 are around half the revenue of Q3, and about a third of Q4 for forums, in my experience.

Point is...forums might be free to join, but they're very much not free. If you want to keep using the forums you enjoy (or hate, it's the same result), then either keep the ads or pay a bit towards the upkeep, because if you don't...they won't be around for long.

@ntmdino Well said! I honestly can’t see the problem with what MN are doing.

That sound you just heard was the point going over your head. 😀

Browser settings

Yes, not free

If you look at the accounts it MN costs are around about £5m per annum to run (based on accounts) and they have around 60 staff ton pay.

That was 2023 so will have gone up a lot

Not much per user though !

Well, it costs them £5m to run the company - pure hosting and maintenance isn't that much. Payroll is (was) £3.2m for 60-odd people, of which it looks like 8-10 are in the development and maintenance end of things, looking at LinkedIn.

So...my estimate there would be (£360k hosting) + (10 * £75k average for a decent dev) = £1.11m for folk directly involved in keeping the place running, or round it down to £1m if they're penny-pinching on the salaries.

It's not much per user, but usually you get around 0.5% of people directly paying to support the site with memberships (often much less), and maybe around 50-60% of people will either decline cookies or use an ad-blocker and - as noted - ad rates for forums are notoriously low.

Everything else will have to be made up with direct-paid ad spots, sponsored content and even donations.

It's a good business, but...precarious, especially when the law lumps forums in with the big social media monstrosities and is then set up to somehow determine forums to be worse in terms of risk than anything else.

I just wish more people would realise that hosting isn't just the free static file and PHP stuff you used to get with your broadband account 20 years ago; it's frighteningly expensive out here in the real world.

They still manage to make millions in profit despite these costs. Not saying they should run a charity or at a loss, but also they don't need people defending them on how they spend or make their money.

I wasn't. I was challenging the notions that a) it's ludicrous to charge money or show ads for "basic forum functionality", and b) that people who pay subscriptions for forums are idiots.

"They oversee what we post." Not at night they don't. They rely on unpaid volunteers.

Paid or unpaid, we (the posters) don't get to decide what stays, do we? It's overseen at some point.

MNHQ has already said about putting in resources to cover 24 hours now, or have I misunderstood that?

The unpaid volunteers are ordinary posters!

MN have specifically avoided saying that they will pay for overnight moderation and the implication is that they are still intending to use volunteers.
What they have said is that there is now a senior member of staff "on call" overnight.
This is a great first step but I am unclear as to what that senior member of staff can do and how quickly. If they are on call and woken up from home, would they be able to access thread reports from there, zap threads, or, if serious enough like the other night, do something like temporarily suspend image posting?

The Nightwatch volunteers can't access the thread reports. They can only respond to things that are posted on the Nightwatch thread which posed serious difficulties the other night when in order to direct night watch to threads with CSA images, people were having to post links to them ( which is illegal)

We all write posts here. People come to read posts.

We stop writing posts, no one comes.

Without the posters the site cannot exist. It has nothing. No content and no purpose and no value.

I hate adverts. I use multiple adblockers on all my devices and the email address mumsnet has for me is a free one that is never checked.

Having checked the privacy policy ( at the very foot of each page here) I’m still shown as rejecting all cookies and the site is still working for me. The day that ends I will be requiring Mumsnet to delete all my content under all my user names and will not be visiting again.

Exactly. Unpaid and untrained, and now severely traumatised.

Meanwhile, all the prefects and head girls are defending company practice that has benefited off their volunteering for... is it 10 years now? From a company that makes something like two millions pounds profit a year.

I kinda understand the reasoning. I use a PC to access mumsnet,and when the "adverts" take up so much of the screen it's not possible to see the top 3rd, (including things like the menu, notifications etc) I feel things have gone a bit too far...

I'm not sure it would be fair to say the night watch are untrained. We don't know if MN give them any training. However, I agree with your general point that MN should have spent more in the past ( at least invested in AI screening earlier and done rigourous stress testing of serious situations which would hopefully have brought some of the weaknesses to light earlier) and should be spending more now to provide paid moderation overnight.

I sincerely doubt they are trained. They were understandably caught out and flustered by the horrific experience. And now they are traumatised, as are others who viewed those CSA images.

There should have been a protocol in place for these poor volunteers for how to handle such an event. Posters should not have been asked to link the offending pictures. (I am not blaming the NW for this.) To my mind, that says no training, no protocol, no backup, no emergency contact number.... for, is it, 10 years?

Well no, because it’s a racist shitrag.

It’s also not a forum where the posters provide the content.

I have a lot more sympathy for a publication charging for access via cookies because they have actual costs for producing the content, as well as costs associated with hosting it online.

MN only has the cost of hosting it - some of which they outsource to unpaid workers (nightwatch).

You should probably read the Terms of Use instead of the Privacy Policy. By submitting content to the site, you grant them a non-revokable license to use that content in perpetuity, just like on any other forum. Also like on any other forum, they are not legally required to delete that content just because you say so, because it's not covered under the GDPR.

You can make them anonymise or delete your personal data, but not the content attached to the account you created.

Being shit content creators doesn’t make it any less true that we create the product.

See also: most influencers.

IMO the issue wouldn’t be considered to be so contentious if it wasn’t for the fact that the announcement has come in the wake of Sunday night’s events, and if it hadn’t been for the language used to describe the users.

It’s not uncommon for sites to have subscription models, although MN isn’t short of cash and made over £2m profit last year so it’s not about that. But there are benefits to a subscription model - from the user’s point of view there is the ability to use the site without adverts, and from the owner’s POV people are less likely to join a site to troll and cause trouble if they have to pay to do so.

You only have to look at the dating sites to see what comes from the free ones vs the paid ones.

Ironically if MN had been a subscription site it would have been less likely for Sunday night’s images to have been uploaded.

But as things stand, on Sunday night a large number of users were traumatised by being exposed to images of child sexual abuse, and MN’s response was that they’re very sorry and are looking into it. But then within 24 hours they’re announcing that users must either consent to cookies/ads or pay because they’re all a load of piggybacking freeloaders.

The two situations combined, i.e. MN not paying for overnight moderation vs then calling their own users freeloaders just leaves a bad taste.

People would have objected to this policy regardless of when it had been announced, but so soon after Sunday’s events was only ever going to provoke criticism.

But it works both ways.

The part of the site that has the most users, both active (ie post) and passive (ie read) is the forum.

The content of the forum is user generated.

Previously, the deal was the content was provided by the users for free, and Mumsnet hosted it, with their costs - and a healthy 25% profit - coming from ad revenue.

Now they have decided that in addition to providing the content, users must either pay to use the forum, or allow their data to be sold. Essentially we are paying with both any content we provide / time spent here AND with money / data.

You might not see any harm in that, but many of us do - even before we add the ways MN doesn’t live up to its end of the bargain (eg outsourcing labour to unpaid workforce, half-arising filters so CSA images were posted over several hours, issues with fake ads etc).

Ads I’m fine with - but cookies are not ok.