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

Sorry, simply cannot afford it, I've cut all subscriptions so this would go against the grain.

I'm sad because I've had so much from.mnet over the years.

No we don't. We work with the likes of Google and Amazon to generate revenue through onsite advertising, we are GDPR compliant and never pass any personal identifiable information (such as email or username) to any 3rd party.

Hang on, I feel lied to now. I asked if you sold our data to third parties like cadburys / kraft and you said you most defiantly do not.

Now you're saying you don't sell identifiable data like email and username. So in fact you are selling data just not email addresses? I would of thought it was obvious I wasn't suggesting you were breaking the law and data regulations selling identifiable data, but you are indeed selling our non identifiable data!

What a mess this has been. All for £1000 when there's millions in the bank from the good years.

If you have already got 200 subscribers at £49 each, that would be £9800 you've made in a few hours. Not bad.

MN would not be wise to suspend/ban these posters indiscriminately without giving refunds. Why would you alienate paying customers simply to pander to Twitter TRAs? Quite apart from the fact that it would almost certainly be illegal to withhold the service and keep all the lucre.

I’d rather make a one off donation. Is there a way to do that?

Far far far too expensive what are ye thinking perhaps if ye offer Netflix along with it

So who else do people think would host these conversations on women's rights, in the face of TRA attacks, even when they lose business over it? Because I've not seen any mainstream alternatives volunteer to put their head above the parapet. Have you?

MN was a godsend to me when my DS was diagnosed with ASD. It has provided me with honestly life-changing info more times than I can count. And it's the most commonly accessed feminist site in the country, offering women in terrible situations support they could not have found so easily elsewhere. It's blunt and at times scary, but it's also offered extraordinary support when women have needed it. It needs to survive.

I'm in for as long as these times last. Because a lot of women wouldn't even know Women's Aid existed, nor the Freedom Programme, if they'd never joined MN - far less that they needed them. And my Woolly Hug got me through a shitty, shitty time in my life because of MN, too.

A space by women, for women, supporting women. I'm here for that, all day long. And a fiver a month to secure its future is fine with me.

My concern here is FWR and the insane deletions (vanishing, on webchats) of legitimate PoV relating to women's issues. Actual women, not the self declared type. I can't see how I can pay real money to have to call men women. Even if they're lawyers.

What outgoings does MN need to pay for?

Are you kidding @HisBetterHalf?!

Justine, if you are worried about income, why don't you sort out Swears By? The newsletter used to go out weekly, and the webpage would be updated at the same time. Now the newsletter is sporadic- you went a month without sending one from mid-Dec to mid-Jan - and you went months last autumn without updating the webpage. I can't understand it. It can't be very expensive to collate, as it is just a summary of MNetters' posts. You are missing out on all the click-through income that could have been generated.

Well, yes, but put another way... by using an ad blocker you're basically not really paying your way for a website that quite unusually has not shut down gender critical comment, despite considerable cost in terms of lost advertisers over the last 18 months.

Ages ago, when it was all kicking off, there was some thread about adblockers and how vital ad revenue was. In the spirit of goodwill and olive branches, I turned my ad blocker off, and even went to the trouble of clicking a few ads per day for you.

Then the goodwill was thrown back in our faces when you started taking reports from known Mens Rights Activists and Gender Ideology Extremists on twitter, and banned people like tehbewilderness and others, and lately, LangCleg

Tell me why the olive branches only go one way?

(+ also second comments about account security and moderation)

Evening, everyone. The FAQs page JustineMumsnet mentioned is now live so that might answer some of your questions. We've popped a link into her OP, too.

Done. Good luck.

£5 a month felt really high on instinct although i will pay it.

I know pricing structures is a nightmare but i wonder if you would do better asking for £3 a month to get more members, or ask for a "donation" and reward any with 6 months free ad free.

I’d not pay a subscription, looking at your accounts for the past 5 years show that not enough forward planning has been done.

I’d also like to direct you to The Bad Mother’s Club, knowing what led to their demise may make you reconsider. It may be the case that Mumsnet is larger but it depends on revenue streams.
Why does Mumsnet not produce more of it’s own content instead of relying on it’s members?

From the FAQ:

Will moderators be able to see who is a paid subscriber?

Not as part of their everyday work. When they need to know this information they will be able to cross-check with the team that has access to the Stripe subscriber information, but this will only happen when there’s a good reason, for example if there is a technical issue with their subscription account

Sorry, I was on the verge of subscribing but this means it's a no from me. I already had to close my last account after your moderator leaked members' data into the public domain. Hell will freeze over before I give your office staff access to more data (with apologies to Hebe, whom I'm sure is lovely ). You need to find way of completely decoupling subscription info from account details available to mods, e.g. via purchase of a token. There is much that I love about MN, but your attitude to information governance has been amateurish for years, and you have given us no assurance that things are tighter now. If you want us to help, you need to offer us cast-iron guarantees re privacy.

If like to know who the founding shareholders are that you have bought out.

I’d not pay a subscription, looking at your accounts for the past 5 years show that not enough forward planning has been done

Oh come off it - no SME business can mitigate the risk of a global pandemic and recession.

They can when an SME thinks they can pay £3m in dividends when their profit is much lower than that year on year and in projection.

Forward planning for an online forum business should include a massive drop in advertising revenue.

Kittens "Stripe itself I'm OK with in terms of relative confidence in its security, but that isn't going to be much help if the organization using it doesn't have appropriate policies in place in terms of who has access to it and a solid track record of making appropriate judgement calls on who to give that access to and how to handle employees who fail to handle user data appropriately."

by way of pictorial analogy...

@SunshineCake

If like to know who the founding shareholders are that you have bought out

Why? What difference does that make?

BIWI - none at all which is why I said interested. I've been here a long time and remember some early MNHQ names. It would be like seeing a post from MamaG or PsychoMumof5

They can when an SME thinks they can pay £3m in dividends when their profit is much lower than that year on year and in projection

I expect they needed VC investment at various points, to scale up. Investors do not invest unless you pay them returns.

Most MNetters seem to work for the public sector and have an entirely unrealistic idea about the commercial world. I admit that the ghastly, saccharine "all jolly schoolgirls together" style of MNHQ tends to fuel the idea the site is just the most spiffing jape ever but, in reality, Justine & co were clearly savvy businesswomen to get this far. But, to get investment, they will have needed to make commitments to pay out dividends when in profit. No investor is going to accept small dividends to allow a company save for a once-in-a-generation rainy day.

I'm thinking about it because I have had so much support, information and laughter from this site.
I am concerned that Justine has not addressed any of the posts referencing the site's history of serious data breaches. What measures have been put in place to ensure these never happen again?

Happy to pay to keep one of the few women-centred but not fashion/beauty focus sites alive.

FWIW I would like paying and non-paying members to have the same access and experience. I'm paying because I think it's important you exist, not to get something out of it.