Mumsnet Premium membership - please support us if you can

[JustineMumsnet]

Hi folks,

First and most importantly, I hope you and yours are safe and well, and that you all stay that way.

After 20 years of unreasonableness, rofls, wtfs, advice and support, and the odd lawsuit, it's fair to say that we are as close as we’ve ever been to existential difficulty.

Like many ad-funded businesses, the COVID-19 crisis has seen us take a big hit to our revenues. The businesses who would normally pay to advertise with us are slashing their marketing budgets, but lots of our outgoings are fixed and we so need to find new ways to keep paying the bills.

We’re doing our darndest to find every single saving we can - lots of our staff have volunteered to reduce their hours, we’ve cancelled all non-essential services, I've taken a pay holiday and we will use every scheme and loan available to us from the government and the bank to help tide us over. But we still need to find alternative revenue streams to ensure we don’t run out of funds in a few months...

To put it frankly, it’s squeaky bum time.

I know this is a very tough time for many of you and some of you are only just keeping the lights on yourselves. We’re sending you our solidarity and we most certainly don’t want anyone to stump up anything they can’t afford, but if you can help, please do subscribe now to our Premium service.

We’ve banged this out as fast as possible in response to the current crisis and it’s definitely not the finished article, but it’s free of banner advertising, so if you’ve ever been vexed by those (or use an ad-blocker) this might be right up your alley. Banner ads also tend to make pages render more slowly and take up bandwidth, so if you’re surrounded by bored kids streaming with their mates, step this way.

We’ve opted for a price point that we hope is doable for most and which covers the potential lost ad revenue for the majority of users. We hope £4.99 per month or £49.99 for a year (less than a pound a week!) feels a reasonable exchange for the value Mumsnet brings you, but in any case you can unsubscribe any time.

Over the next little while we’ll look to add some extra features: things that people have requested regularly like editing, sorting posts by the OP, and reading offline.

Rest assured we remain committed to always providing a free version of the site, as we fundamentally believe that access to the advice and support Mumsnet offers should not depend on your ability to pay.

And if you can’t spare any cash right now… then of course we get it. It would still be very helpful if you removed any ad blockers or clicked on affiliate links around the site when you shop, joined our insight panel or even shared the best Mumsnet threads on your social channels whenever you can - it all helps.

If you have any questions at all feel free to post them here and I'll get back to you. We also have a page of FAQs that might answer your question.

Hold tight everyone.

Love

Justine and the team at MNHQ

@MoleSmokes
It works fine on rollercoaster.ie
Posters don't have to name change every two minutes to protect their anonymity.

I think thoguh, ON an irish forum, there are just far fewer people and if you recognise somebody there's less doubt that it's them, so a board with no edit function wouldn't work there. But people don't delete their own posts to change the intent.

They tend mostly to protect their identity by deleting details from posts that aren't current.

There are always trolls no matter what you do but it's nice to protect the anonymity of the mostly decent people.

What is FWR please ?

It seems really off that Mumsnet are being quizzed about their profits and staff like a naughty child 😐

They are a business offering a premium service, it’s not compulsory.

If they had just introduced the service no one would be asking these questions. But what they did was preface the introduction with a bit of a sob story and made it seem like this was only to raise essential funds. (Which we now know isn’t the case) so yes- people do have questions about why MNHQ have no money when it appears they are asking MNers to help them out with that.

Sorry @JustineMumsnet, just saw that you answered my question (from someone else) whilst I was typing it.

I can’t afford £50 but I do owe a debt of gratitude to MN, so will happily give what I can if your approach to this changes.

I’d love to do this because I’ve been here a lot of years but atm DH has lost his job and I’m too ill to work so we have nothing to give. Well, I could possibly manage a small one off amount, but not £49.99 a year. I’ve been cancelling every subscription going like crazy (and I guess that’s the problem for so many businesses).
Once life has improved I happily will (and I suspect this might be part of the problem for you, that many members are in dire straits themselves right now) but I think you need to think about what members are getting for their money. Totally ad free is a good start.

I'd be much more likely to contribute to a fundraiser as the security concerns would be minimal.

Ahh so this is why the Beta version of the App has stopped working? Dammit I was really enjoying filtering posts by OP!

Anyway, I will definitely subscribe on payday.

My 2 pence - Adding another little 'premium only' feature on top of the ad blocker, I think, will definitely appeal to more users. The ads don't really bother me, however as I said above, I will still subscribe regardless :)

Mumsnet is all that keeps me going as a single parent with depression. It genuinely is my social link and my escapism. It simply cannot go away.

What is FWR please ?

The Feminism / Women's Rights chat board.
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights

I'm happy to subscribe. I've had invaluable support and a sense of community from Mumsnet for the last few years, it's worth a lot to me to make sure that the site stays around and doesn't go under.

It's also fairly gobsmacking to see how some people understand so little about the basics of business finance but are really happy to explain to Justine how she must be doing it wrong

This is great I hope all those people pompously telling Justine how she is Businessing Wrongly are doing well with their own successful forums with as many users as MN has

I will subscribe when funds allow and consider it cheap for the amount of time I spend here and the previous years of entertainment, advice, support, laughs, cat photos and cake recipes. I don't think FWR is perfect by any means but I really fucking appreciate it and like the rest of MN apart from fucking AIBU my life would be more boring without it.

I would also love if people could buy gift subscriptions - it would be a great gift for new parents or not even parents, women who like intelligent conversation and also like to swear. I would also happily pay, if I could afford it, to have the benefit of some FWR posters I would miss if they went and Lang

But @JustineMumsnet you can't call it Premium Mumsnet, it has to be called CatMeYouCunt

We have around 100 employees earning approx 35k a year. Many of them are highly skilled in sought after roles.

What on earth are 100 people doing for Mumsnet? Is this serious?
There are 100 people working at mumsnet, salaried??

Done. In. Bargain for the hours of pleasure and laughs on here. 😄

@JustineMumsnet- I deal with payments made by Stripe for a small organisation - I can see names, addresses, email addresses, and the IP address of the device used to pay. Someone at MN will have access to that info from payments

Hopefully this won't be overlooked and some clarity will be given.

I think it's a pretty simple decision.

Do you want this site to survive and can you afford it?

If the answer to both is yes, then it makes sense to subscribe.

Allegations of financial mis-judgement are unfair. No-one could have predicted this situation.

Some posters don't seem to understand the financial reality. If income is down (and ad spend is always one of the first things to be cut, but especially so when so many businesses are not trading) fixed costs still have to be met. Yes they can be reduced (and this has been done) but last years profits won't last indefinitely and some of has already been spent (which wouldn't have happened if Justine had a crystal ball).

It's all about cash flow and they are running out of it.

Personally I think this site is a tremendous resource and I'd be sad to see it become a casualty of this unprecedented situation.

So yes, I'll subscribe and consider it £50 well spent if it keeps the business afloat, not just for myself but the many other users whose lives have been changed for the better who can't spare the money and I won't whine about premium features nor make demands in return.

Truth is MN has given far more to me over the last 15 years than I've given back and I'm happy (and thankfully able) to redress the balance.

I joined a site in January at £14 for 3 months , vert good quality etc but what really disappointed me was the absolute lack of traffic and therefore the support and discussion I was looking for didn’t exist

Irial with respect what exactly is it you know about what must need to happen to make a site of this size run the way it does, you question 100 employees but really what do you know about it ?

I'm in for the annual subscription. I've only been on MN for about 2 years, but found it so much saner and better moderated than the alternatives and I love the insights into a different culture.

@JustineMumsnet - Just so you know, no problem at all processing the transaction from the US. Hopefully I'll get a decent exchange rate. And Stripe is very reputable and secure.

Same here as many. I am able to and would love to help sustain this amazing resource - but not at the risk of losing my anonymity. Donation preferred.

Honestly those of you who subscribed are being taken for mugs - you can go on the Companies House website and see exactly what Justine earns and the 8.4million of reserves. It will be interesting to see the 2019 accounts as there seem to be some significant changes.

@Irial

We have around 100 employees earning approx 35k a year. Many of them are highly skilled in sought after roles.

What on earth are 100 people doing for Mumsnet? Is this serious?
There are 100 people working at mumsnet, salaried??

Yes and Gransnet. And they are running the site - tech, product, community management. We have a team running the jobsite. A team running gransnet, a video team, a small data and analytics team, an offers and deals team, a team that runs insight and product tests, a sales team, a finance/admin team, a team that produces mumsnet editorial content, a press team, hr, seo and email management etc...

@CrazyTimesAreOccurring

''the 200 odd folks'' well how rude!

I don't understand the need for an Edit button - why? Repost if you've seriously cocked up.

My heart isn’t exactly bleeding for mumsnet HQ

Check out that profit!

I'm happy to pay for a short period while we get through this difficult time, I don't think a two tier system is a good idea, everyone should get the same Mumsnet. Can I make a donation instead of signing up?

[quote raviolidreaming]**@JustineMumsnet- I deal with payments made by Stripe for a small organisation - I can see names, addresses, email addresses, and the IP address of the device used to pay. Someone at MN will have access to that info from payments

Hopefully this won't be overlooked and some clarity will be given.[/quote]

Yes you are right - we have to have access to that same data in Stripe so we can cancel subscriptions etc. but we don't have access to financial data. We control who in MN has access to the Stripe dashboard where this info is stored. It's fewer than five individuals and have already had thorough training. The key thing is that we don't store the info on our own database.

*Seems a bit like you put profits before users for a long time (understandable for a business) but now the shits hitting the fan you're coming back to those users you were willing to ignore, to ask for money. While saying you can provide features that have previously been asked for and denied. Repeatedly.

It stinks a bit to be honest.*

This, with a million bells on. What a joke.