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[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

As I have learned from many business gurus on here in the last few weeks, every business who does not:
-have a years worth of expenses in the bank
-claim minimal tax deductions even where these are utterly legal and ethical

• have miraculous gold plated insurance which covers a new virus which didn't exist
• have a crystal ball
• pay all staff at least the average wage for part time hours

-top up furlough to 100%

Is worthless and should be ashamed of themselves. Oh but MN has too many staff and pays them too much. Of course...

I would assume that mumsnet are doing like businesses up and down the land, reviewing their cashflow projections, and going "oh fuck." They're seeing reduced revenues and spotting the point in the future (which may be next month or a few months away) where they will have a problem and trying to mitigate it. This isn't normal downturns, normal changes, this is something way outside of most businesses contingency/scenario/stress testing. And most are also worried about the timing of the supposed government support - will furlough payments come through on time? A few days ago only 1 in 130 applications for a CBIL had been approved...

That said, in terms of this specific offering the moderation of FWR is a concern to me. I value being able to speak relatively freely and a moderation stance which requires women to essentially lie and which permits random twats from twitter to report people is problematic, as are the security concerns around it. I appreciate that MN allows more open discussion in this regard than some other sites but given the recent change in press reporting regarding this I think it would be worth reviewing your moderation policy. If you got that right - and ensured posters details wouldn't be released - then I'd be up for subscribing. There seems to be a fair number of us thinking a similar way.

I think mumsnet has lost its sparkle. It is now a business. It is dependent upon posters to generate traffic. I don't use anything other that the chat rooms so £49 is expensive - I cant see how you price yourself like Disney etc when the content is not of the right level. Teachers can use TES forums for free.

Aca excuse me what now?
No
I'm also a small limited company (wedding photography)

I can't tell you how abhorrent I find your begging thread right now.

I have couples who have spent their life savings on their wedding for this year. I have willingly moved everyone's bookings without penalty. I have not asked them for a penny more. I am now penniless this year. I'm trying to find work in retail or anywhere I can to support my three kids (single mum).

It was my decision to work for myself and that was based in all sorts of complicated reasons to do with my kids which I won't bore you with now, but all of which were very important in my decision making.

As a director of a limited company (as I'm sure, are you) I'm not included in the raft of government measures to help those who don't work for employers but I'm buggered if I'll expect the general public to crowdfund for me.

As the directors of business, it's our job to make the best decisions for both the benefit of the business, it's users, directors and investors.

MNHQ if your first port of call is the people who need your services for free rather than the people who use your services to warm their daily bread then you actually need to give your collective heads a wobble.

Selling something to women they can already get for free, at a time when most of the women on here have little or no income and DV rates are up, women worldwide are all in a position of less power and freedom because of lockdown and lack of income, all of us, not just MNHQ. A begging thread. Wow. Maybe you could take in some ironing.

Your security is a nightmare and Stripe isn't much better. Asking content providers to pay for the privilege because you bought out shareholders instead of investing in the site is insulting.
Given your site breach history you would have done better to ask for donations instead of asking people to trust you to secure their banking data.

Interesting request. Will rtft

BbrigidSt get for free from where else ?

Done! Have my money! I will not notice the fifty quid a year. If nothing else it will annoy them even more... and I haven’t RTFT.

MNHQ if your first port of call is the people who need your services for free rather than the people who use your services to warm their daily bread then you actually need to give your collective heads a wobble.*

I don't understand what this means. Who do you think MN should be asking for money?

And what will happen to all the people who need their services if MN goes under?

@MrsNoah2020
Except when I’m an accountant in a large business and know what I’m looking for in financial statements for M&A
We aren’t all bleeding heart liberals and we don’t always agree with Mumsnet’s business model.

Maybe you should start by slashing some of your £350k a month staffing bill eh?

@AlternativePerspective Bloody hell - that is a huge staff bill!

@CandyLeBonBon

I'm also a small limited company (wedding photography)

I can't tell you how abhorrent I find your begging thread right now.

Can you really not see the difference between you and Mumsnet?

Do you employ 100 people? I really don't think so.

FFS.

None of these SM platforms makes money until they are enormous. Twitter didn't turn a profit until it had 320 million users - 5 times the population of the entire U.K.

The comments on this thread show what an impossible situation MN has been in. Lots of MNetters seem to resent the idea of the shareholders seeing any profits at all. They want a financially secure platform, but they don't want it to make any commercially driven decisions.

We were always planning to introduce Premium this year, but we've accelerated its release because needs must.

Well there ya go. You’re taking advantage of this situation to suit your need to make more money.

You aren’t a bricks and mortar company. You are well funded and highly profitable, traffic must have increased massively while many people are at home on lockdown and bored. This seems very opportunist.

Somebody on the other thread pointed out that no other SM forum is asking folk to pay
I wouldn't know as I'm not on any others, but if this is so, doesn't it beg the question of why MN are alone in doing what they've done?

At the end of 2018 - mumsnet had a 100 production staff

MN isn’t Netflix or the Guardian. Its users are the product, not the customer.

^^This

I’ve just taken out a sub to the Guardian as I was consuming a lot of their content (news). Here, the readers create the content which you then monetise.

Here yes agree we do provide the content and that’s a transaction I’ve been ok with. Not to pay though

Somebody on the other thread pointed out that no other SM forum is asking folk to pay
I wouldn't know as I'm not on any others, but if this is so, doesn't it beg the question of why MN are alone in doing what they've done?

Facebook/IG are free because they are mining your data in ways you can't even imagine. Twitter does the same to a less extent, and carries ads, but still only recently turned a profit.

Both traditional & new media are struggling, unless they data-mine like FB. The Jewish Chronicle went into liquidation today. The Guardian is in trouble and dependent on US investment.

People want content for nothing. That is only sustainable if you have decent ad revenue, or if you're taking backhanders from the Russians to throw elections, FB-style.

I havent read all 25 pages so sorry if this has already been raised. If I was an advertiser I would probably want to target the premium subscribers not the ones who cant afford £5 a month or are too savvy to pay it.
I think you will potentially lose even more advertising revenue because of this MN.

We are the content so yes we are providing it for free. Unlike The Guardian etc.

We are the content so yes we are providing it for free. Unlike The Guardian etc.

Same for Twitter.

Look, I'm not saying MN is faultless, commercially, but I am saying that people who don't understand why dividends need to be paid, or why a company with a £7m turnover can't just cruise through a massive recession, are talking out of their arse.

I actually think it’s a mad thing to do right now. The people that own Tattle must be rubbing their hands with glee. Let’s face it people come to MN for the forums and TL is starting to really challenge MN for the breadth of discussion it offers. I don’t understand how you can go from a situation where you’re financially secure to suddenly being on your knees after a couple of weeks of lockdown when your traffic must be increasing massively.

Of course we are the content.

But how does that get delivered?

Who pays for the servers? The software?

Who pays for the tech?

Who pays for the staff who moderate the site?

Who pays for the team who deals with all the market research projects that clients are commissioning - the people who want to know what we all think of their new products or services?

Who deals with all the advertisers - the people who, after all are paying for us to use the site for free?

If the advertisers aren't paying - and they genuinely are not! - who is going to pay for the 100 or so people who currently are paid a decent wage to run Mumsnet?

For Mumsnet to operate profitably, they have to balance their costs with their revenue. And their revenue comes mainly (I think - I don't know) from advertising. They get other revenue from market research. But in the current climate, when businesses are falling by the wayside every day, Mumsnet's revenue from any kind of marketing activity is disappearing - hence the need to look for other sources of revenue.

All the people who work at MNHQ, delivering what we all want as 'content deliverers' need to be paid. MNHQ needs revenue to do that. If they aren't getting the income from their usual advertisers - what else do you want them to do?