OO you are a brave woman - and in many ways I agree with you.
Yesterday, reading threads, I was getting cross that many people were making the cosy assumption that mumsnet could happily survive without Milupa's payment. How did anyone actually know that? It could have been a make or break situation. Even if there was not a financial crisis looming in the background, perhaps there was a more personal crisis looming. Running mumsnet must take up huge amounts of time - perhaps the team had reached a point where they simply couldn't continue taking that time away from their own children and partners unless they got properly paid for it. Mumsnet is not a charity, is it?
It's all very well people beating their chests and reporting mumnset, but we don't have to pay the bills, or work for well under market rates.
How many of the hardcore anti Milupa advertising group were prepared to see mumsnet cease to exist? I did ask this question on another thread yesterday and not one person answered that question, AFAIK, apart from Enid.
No special needs threads, no allergy threads, no education threads, no teenager threads - all that support and expertise no longer there. Of course breast and bottle feeding is a very important and emotive issue, but huge numbers of mumsnet users have passed that stage in their lives. Of course people still care about it, but it is one stage out of many you go through as a parent.
I am not happy that mears and tiktok and others felt they had to leave and understand why they did this. I do think mumsnet was wrong to take milupa advertising in the format it chose. But amongst all the talking about the advert's legality and the reporting of the mumsnet/milupa ad, it seemed there was this cosy assumption that minus the ad and that revenue, mumsnet could carry on regardless.
As I see, this very luckily seems to be the case - but that's not thanks to yesterday's activities.