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

@JustineMumsnet changing tack not rack! I am sure your rack is fine Sorry!

I don’t use an ad blocker, I don’t want to pay £50 for premium, or £4.99 if it means linking my RL details to MN. Data breaches etc.

I do very much want to donate you a bit of anonymous cash to a fundraiser, though.

Especially for every comment on this thread about wage bills, how you should run your business, how the website is shit and shouldn’t cost as much to run - but should definitely be FREE because it’s an essential service - how you’re so insensitive asking for money when people are losing their jobs and worried about putting food on the table ... the fucking irony, when you’re trying to still be an employer to 100 people. I’m sure you expected this from the thread but bloody hell, I’d struggle to be civil in the face of some of this.

Crack on, MNHQ. You’ve been worth more than £50 of my money over the years. Please set up an anonymous ‘Chuck a bit of cash in’ pot and I’ll happily bung you money for nothing at all but the pleasure of supporting you.

If I can call a man a man I’d consider it.

Otherwise no way.

"You are now, however, asking me to pay for the privilege of self-censorship, of not speaking truth, of lying about reality. I will happily subscribe to MN Premium if you will relax the censorship rules in FWR, and reinstate respected posters who have been banned for honesty."

@JustineMumsnet I can't see an answer to @JellySlice's remark (above). My apologies if this has already been addressed and I've overlooked it.

JellySlice sums it up for me. I'd happily subscribe but not if I'm obliged to lie about people's sex or to assign incorrect pronouns to them.

@JustineMumsnet

You've said you didn't want to create a two-tier system with donations in case people who donated a lot were misbehaving and it affected the moderation, yet you also said that paid members won't be treated any differently to non-paying ones. How does that work? Surely your moderating team are either trustworthy enough to not give special treatment or they are not?

You could easily have launched an AO3 style fundraising drive where people could have anonymously given whatever they could afford, and whatever they wanted to pay. There would have been no obvious differences on the boards, which there will be as soon as some people have an edit feature and some don't.

It would also have protected people in the event of any data breach because there's no way that Mrs Mary Smith's £50 donation could be connected to a poster's thread about her abusive husband or that Sarah Jones' £5000 donation could be linked to her post about the new shared toilet policy at her word.

It would have been a much less divisive way to raise funds at a time when people are facing major financial uncertainty.

Also you'll have to have a much clearer moderation template if you are going to ban people who've paid for a year's sub, but upset someone after a month.

No. Won't be doing it. Y'all got too big for your boots and it became an advertising agency to annoying levels.
You went from a parent support mechanism to a greedy business and it's beyond your fathom how to deal with it in the current climate.
Take your oil like everyone else.

What Monty27 said

It's abundantly clear that MNHQ has rushed this idea out there without sufficient thought.

Let's face it, the subs they are asking people to pay for a Premium Membership is to assist them during Covid19, as Justine has clarified upfront, the supposed value proposition is a complete red herring because there isn't one, no matter how much they try to convince people there is.

They should have decided what their message would be - if it's a contribution to help them stay afloat, then say that! Don't try to convince people there's something in there for them, when there just isn't. And don't piss people off by releasing features just because people show the colour of their money, when they could have fixed functionality ages ago.

The more questions being asked, the more holes this idea exposes, there are more holes than a sieve!

They've broken the golden rule, never expose a half-baked idea to your stakeholders without having thoroughly tested out all scenarios.

I'm also of the opinion that I don't want my data linked to my posts which I feel would be jeopardised by paying for the service.
It my give me the kick I need to stop mn to be honest which I'm sure is not your desired effect but I'm not paying a fiver a month in the current climate for people to be nasty and slate others.
I think you would have been better off with a donation page

I'd rather MN were upfront and said "look, we're struggling because of the following reasons, any donation you wish to make, no matter how small, would be really appreciated and would help us do x".

Instead they've brought out a very half-arsed idea about "premium" membership that currently offers no discernible benefits whatsoever and isn't even ad-free.

If you want people to buy your product then it needs to be considerably better than the free version currently available, and this clearly isn't.

StartupRepair
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?

I also posted about this earlier in the thread. The radio silence despite numerous posters asking related questions is very telling. It's all well and good saying that only certain employees will have access to this data, however actions speak louder than words. Considering we know from past experiences that even interns have been able to access our data, MN idea of certain staff members doesn't fill me with confidence.

28 pages, multiple replies from @JustineMumsnet but not a single one addressing the fact that just 12 months ago there was a serious data breach of users’ data by a disgruntled employee who didn’t like the fact people were talking about biological reality.

Please address the concerns about this.

And on page 9, you replied with this:

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. (And at most you'd lose £4.99 of value if you subscribed monthly

You focused on the ad blocker part here Justine but what about the rest of that post?

Have I got this right? I could subscribe and pay for a year. As a feminist I say something that misogynists on twitter don’t like.
Theyre not members or subscribers but their reports are listened to

Why should posters here pay for the privilege of having their posts reported by people once the Bat signal goes out to Twitter? I imagine the argument will be something like how a post wouldn’t be deleted if it didn’t break the rules, but we all know that isn’t true because everyone has experienced their language being policed. I’m not going to pay any money when we have to dance around the language of our posts to avoid inciting a report from a documented group of activists who have publicly declared they monitor posts for digressions.

And I just struggle to believe that the posts on FWR were deemed so offensive that a financially significant number of advertisers pulled their wares from MN. Are we really meant to believe that money-grabbing advertisers are so moralistic they refuse to post ads to people they deem to be “transphobic”? That they only want to sell stuff to the “right sort” of Mumnsnetter? I just don’t buy it. I really don’t.

Which advertisers stopped spending money at MN? Someone mentioned Flora - it is more likely they started spending on alternative ways to reach people, like using influencers (as Flora have done, badly, but whatever). The world of advertising is changing and will continue to evolve, just as MN needs to. Maybe a paid subscription is worth it for better security, decent moderation etc - I can see the appeal of that (Tattle sure doesn't offer that - now. am doubting whether MN does either), but I don't think presenting it as an emergency appeal with the benefit of only eliminating ads is the way to do it.

*Based on the figures you have given, either

• the average salary is £42000 (in which case, where do I apply?) or
• your average monthly staff bill is £292000 (speak to your accountant, I think he is skimming) or
• HR has lost track of 20 employees (I’m job hunting, I can either replace the skivers or the HR department, I’m not fussy)*

That is meant to be tongue in cheek but a 20% difference in figures is significant. There is absolutely no expectation or obligation on you to post any of this information but if you do post, inaccuracies do not help your case in building support for a paid-for service.

It costs a lot more to employ someone than just the salary they see, especially if you're trying to be the best employer you can be (and MN has made a lot of the fact that they are good, flexible employers, as you'd hope since that's what they call on others to do). I used to work as part of an externally funded project and got a big shock when I saw the entry for me in the project budget - it was so much more money than I saw. That included pension contribution (and both employer and employee contributions are much higher than average in my scheme) and NI. I also saw what my mat leave (enhanced, but not an unusually generous scheme) cost - and I bet that comes up a lot for MNHQ given that they describe themselves as family-friendly employers (and, again, would be incredibly hypocritical not too). Employing people is expensive!

Hope my subscription helps you and your amazing team at this difficult time.

If a subscriber pays yearly, and does not adhere to the rules, within the first month of subscription, what happens their already processed yearly fee?

@packetandtripe She stated earlier in the thread that there will be no refunds.

The suggestion was that anyone who thinks they might get banned should go for the monthly option...

No chance! Netflix is £9.99 a month. Is the content and value Mumsnet provide worth half of that? Definitely not to me. This will be a great move for the other parenting forums though...

28 pages, multiple replies from @JustineMumsnet but not a single one addressing the fact that just 12 months ago there was a serious data breach of users’ data by a disgruntled employee who didn’t like the fact people were talking about biological reality

28 pages .... also the length of the last accounts files at Companies House which make an interesting read.

For me this site is something I dip into for a bit of a distraction, not a necessity at all and I definitely wouldn’t pay.

£5 a month, almost the cost of my NT membership or the same cost as English Heritage membership. I get a lot out of those.

Wouldn’t dream of paying for mumsnet.

This, from the FAQ, is reassuring:

Will Mumsnet hold my payment details? What guarantees can you give about data security and payment details?

Mumsnet will not hold your payment details; these are held by our payment provider.

There must be a link between user name and actual name plus bank details somewhere on Mumsnet. Is that right? Where will that be held?

When someone subscribes we store a Stripe subscription ID against their Mumsnet user account, so we know they are a Premium subscriber. All card details are stored in Stripe. When logged in to Stripe we can't see the card details, only the last four numbers.

If this could be sorted out by enabling additional payment methods, eg. PayPal, then it would help further:

Will ‘Mumsnet’ appear on my bank statements if I subscribe?

Yes it will. This is necessary so that people remember what each particular charge is for; it’s also an anti-fraud measure on Stripe’s side. We’re afraid there isn’t a way around this at the moment.

Several other recurring questions are answered in the FAQ, although some are not:

www.mumsnet.com/info/mumsnet-premium-faq

I have already argued that an Edit function would be a bad idea in practice and mentioned issues with FWR that others have raised repeatedly in this thread.

Something I definitely like is the bog-standard, few bells-and-whistles functionality of the Talk Boards, although Advanced Search, "I'm On" and "Watching" functions could do with some improvement.

Overhauling the Talk Boards would IMHO be a mistake, particularly at this time. It would erect a barrier to the current level of participation and lead to streams of queries and complaints that Mods would have to deal with. Not to mention arguments about whether particular features are a good or a bad thing.

"Site Stuff" should be the least interesting and visited Board. Too many and/or too dramatic changes to appearance and functionality risk technical issues becoming a major topic for members and, externally, "the Mumsnet story".

There must surely be other options for "rewarding" Premium Subscribers? There are many ideas in this thread that members say they would value, whether as rewards specifically for Premium Members or as improvements for everyone. FWR Rules and Moderation jump out as repeated requests but there are others that are unrelated to FWR and Talk in general.

Mumsnet must surely be considering some sort of anonymous Donation system after so many suggestions in this thread?

I can't believe anyone is seriously suggesting Quora as an alternative to Mumsnet. Reddit is not comparable either. Each "subreddit" is a separate "community" created and moderated by a user who makes the rules and can "promote" other users to be moderators. If you like idiosyncratic moderation with zero consistency between topic areas and a forum where you can "upvote" and "downvote" posts, you will like Reddit.

Please no "Badges", "Awards", "post-ratings", etc. on Mumsnet. Keep it simple. The content is what keeps us coming back.

This is a difficult one.

Nearly every business has been impacted. We’ve had to furlough just over 60% of staff and those that continue to work have agreed a pay cut. We’ve had to really strip back costs - including advertising - which we spent a considerable amount on. Salaries are by far our biggest overhead.

I think some users are forgetting the wage bill will include things like NI and pension contributions do it’s not a case of divide that by the number of users. I am slightly surprised at the number of employees but admittedly don’t know the ins and outs of your business. I think the core of users only see this as a forum but guess a lot of business time is spent elsewhere.

Going back maybe 7 years, the site was a better place. I used to get more product tests from the insights panel (in the last 12 months I think I’ve only had one test for a multipack of crisps) and the forums were a lot more discussion based. And far more reasonable. There is often very little discussion now, people reply to the OP but don’t read other people’s posts, you can post something and unless you are the OP 90% of the time it’s ignored unless somebody wants to argue with you, and if I want that I’ll WhatsApp my sister! There are too many trolls and troll hunting. Moderation can be inconsistent. Most worryingly I’ve gone to write a reply several times, read it back and think “would I want this in the Daily Mail” and consequently delete it. Engagement is too low now to make me consider this a premium service.

I seem to have a lot of DDs, from essentials like my phone and cloud back up, to good value entertainment like Netflix, Prime, Disney and AppleTV to things that make me happy or healthier like the gym or subs for the children. I’m not sure where MN would fit in. Mildly entertaining on occasions, normally a time waster isn’t something I’d pay for. Even if we weren’t in a financial crisis with me on reduced pay.

Sorry, I do wish you luck, I’d be sad to see the site go, but it doesn’t add value to my life and as such, I can’t pay for it.

Premium users only product tests might get me interested...

It does seem like mumsnet will be rubbing their hands together when all this is over and they've got all their ad revenue back AND a fiver a month from lots of people.

Apologies if you’ve answered this already Justine but unfortunately the search function on here is so antiquated I can’t find it, but how many of your 100 staff have been furloughed?

You said somewhere upthread that you didn’t see a pandemic coming. Nobody did, of course, but business continuity and emergency planning is a thing that all employers your size should be well versed in.

MN is a big money business these days. To be in such dire straits so quickly implies a lack of contingency and security underpinning this business that is quite shocking to me, and I hope that, if/when easier times come, you will take professional advice to remedy that. For an online- based employer of 100 people to be soliciting public donations after two weeks like this is quite a damning reflection.

You’ve made it quite clear over the years in your attitude towards forum improvements and also in your attitude towards not letting women call men men on the boards that you are a business not a charity. MNHQ have repeatedly rebuffed long term posters who have tried to engage you on both subjects.

It’s cost a lot of goodwill and I think perhaps it would do MNHQ some good to reflect on that now they suddenly need users to see them in a more sympathetic light.

Many years ago when you took the decision to push and market AIBU you decided to put profits before your founding mission statement of making life easier for parents. You could have had both but knew that arguing would improve your income streams.
Mumsnet is now a site infected with a culture of binary aggressive responses of reasonable or unreasonable regardless of what topic the OP posts in. You’ve pushed your agenda even further with AIBU polls.
Let’s face it mumsnet, you make your money from encouraging people to argue with each other.
Your moderation during this outbreak has been shocking. People are being outright cunts to one another with wild abandon and you’re sitting back and resting on your “light touch, we respond to reported posts blah blah”. I’d not be surprised if people’s mental health and general happiness has worsened rather than improved by posting on this site. Any supportive posts are negated by shitty goady comments that you bear ultimate responsibility for by curating a site that encourages division.
And now you are crying poor and want £5 a month for fewer ads.
Nope.
This might be the straw that breaks my 16 year (Now much waned) membership of this site.

And I just struggle to believe that the posts on FWR were deemed so offensive that a financially significant number of advertisers pulled their wares from MN. Are we really meant to believe that money-grabbing advertisers are so moralistic they refuse to post ads to people they deem to be “transphobic”? That they only want to sell stuff to the “right sort” of Mumnsnetter? I just don’t buy it. I really don’t.

The fact is that Mumsnet is a tainted brand. If you’re in the middle of FWR it’s possible you don’t see how it’s perceived further afield. Eyes roll if you mention it even tangentially. This is 90% down to the perception of transphobia. I never, ever admit to coming on here - it’s not worth people thinking I’m a frothing-at-the-mouth gender-critical nutter and actually, really, truly avoiding me in real life.

FWIW I don’t go on the FWR boards much, I avoid like the plague because there’s more to MN than that and it’s easy to scroll past; and, I know not everyone there is a mentalist and there are interesting points to debate. But that’s the perception. No way would I ever associate my brand with MN though, it opens a company up to the sort of internet criticism that’s very time-heavy to deal with, plus it’s just not a worthy association. I have zero doubt that they’ve lost advertising revenue over this.