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

I agree that this is will be nearer the truth LisaSimpsonbff as some of us have seen the Brands topple on Twitter after they were mobbed:

"if we run a big campaign on MN we'll have to deal with a social media bombardment calling us transphobes; if we use another website instead we don't get any of that, so why have the hassle?'

Outside of those incidents, Mumsnet's reputation is either, "Babies and baking" (those who have never visited) or "OMG!!!! Terrifying!!!" if they have ever set foot on AIBU.

It is not so much a reflection on Mumsnet as on companies that fold and make changes at the slightest suggestion they might be "transphobic" or are told how to be more "inclusive", eg. "Always" removing the "Venus logo" from period-products after a nudge that "transmen have periods too". Sometimes it only seems to take one person contacting a company for them to capitulate.

Mumsnet has been targeted precisely because Mumsnet allows women to discuss that-which-must-not-be-debated. The FWR Rules are strict, annoy the hell out of Mumsnet members, posts and threads are deleted when there have been complaints that are patently spurious - often from non-members sending emails to Mumsnet.

The "problem" is not that Mumsnet hosts transphobic content but that Mumsnet allows women to talk about women's rights and feminism.

Trans activists are overplaying their hand with companies IMHO. They will get sick of them calling Wolf and making demands and will look to the bottom line. They might well have a very different attitude post-Covid19 and be glad for advertising on the sites that survive.

We are just demographics, clicks and page views etc to advertisers I doubt they look further than that.

People making money off social media (‘influencers’ too silver lining) will be the first to go as marketing departments contract budgets.

It's fine for you to draw conclusions based on your own experience nivde, just it would be worth considering whether you might be operating in a particular bubble yourself.

I'm astounded that you can't refund any money - what happened to Consumer Contracts Regulations?

The Daily Mail website has very high ad revenues, despite being openly gender critical and espousing many other views that are anathema to the Twitterati. If big advertisers were deterred by non-progressive views, the DM would have gone bust years ago.

Oh the Daily Mail is a very different set-up/scale: comparing the two companies is not like to like.

Ok, so what if MNHQ used user-mods? I think Reddit does. And, here's the genius bit, WE would elect them from our own regular, known and trusted posters? (Maybe have it that only paying members can be mods?? )
Also ban non-member reports.

Maybe even just for FWR....then MNHQ could distance itself from the bad, bad women who like their freedom to call a dude, a dude.

Ha. I vote Datun & Barracker to mod FWR.

I'm another who'd be happy to support a crowdfunder but is reluctant to hand over personal and financial data.

There must surely be other options for "rewarding" Premium Subscribers?

I'm not the least bit interested in 'rewards' for subscribing. Don't want extra amenities or a separate lounge. Prefer no editing function, and none of the complicated and divisive posting facilities on SM sites.

Can't really be bothered to argue about a (thus far) one-off payment of £4.99.

Fully agree that the (mis)treatment of FWR posters and clear attempts to appease lobbyists outside MN has been deeply unsatisfactory - but I don't think a few subscriptions alone will change that in the short term.

And frankly, good luck to anyone who cares to burrow into the bank account I used to Apple-pay. They'd probably decide to put money into it for me.

Oh the Daily Mail is a very different set-up/scale: comparing the two companies is not like to like

Sure, and I'm not suggesting otherwise. I am just pointing out that the DM's ad revenues demonstrate that big companies are not deterred from advertising on a site that Twitter hates. There was an active campaign last year to get advertisers to drop the DM, which fizzled out because most of the public are either indifferent or uncomfortable at attempts to suppress freedom of speech.

I would happily pay a lump sum and don't need the extra features, but monthly payments don't really do it for me. I will if they are the only option though.

Honestly, we all use MN and I think we should contribute according to our ability to do so and the amount asked for is very reasonable. If you don't want to pay for yourself, pay for those women who have used this site to gain information about how to deal with PND, violence, abuse and so on and who had no other means.

Why don't MNHQ ask for a cash donation from non-members in order to report us? Funny how they will kowtow to the TRAs, shitting all over their actual, loyal members, but when they need money it's US they want to put our hands in our pockets.

I am happy to pay. I choose to pay for a lot of services that I could get for free, e.g. podcasts, museums, in order to support the creators/owners, which in turn lets them provide free services to people who cannot afford to pay.

But I am not giving MN or their agents any of my contact details, because they have shown they cannot be trusted with them. Poster after poster has made this point, and no one from MN has addressed it properly. Until there is a way to support MN without sharing any personal details, I'm a no.

Also, I quite like the ads! I have an ad-blocker on my desktop for other reasons, but quite like seeing the ads on my iPad.

Please do set up a donate function. If some individuals donate a lot then that's kind of fair in a Marxist sense - from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.

Sorry, it’s the wages bill that gets me. Some people at MNHQ must be laughing their assets off at the ‘who’s being paid less than £20k a year’ threads.

It’s less about ability for me but value. And exchange.

People see it differently but this is a habit I could quit anyway.

I would happily give a small one-off donation, no strings attached.

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

All this is true, but MN are hardly in the same ballpark size wise or in performance, so they're really not comparable

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

Indeed
I'll say yet again that not everything can be covered when things have been done in haste, but given members' concern about this I'd have thought it would be included

Not sure what's so funny about the wages bill tbh. Average salary of 35k for the sort of roles described, based in London, doesn't seem outrageous to me.

Why does it need to be in London?

It’s the number if people I find remarkable. We are providing all the content and reporting for the deletions.

And night shift is largely staffed by volunteers.

I seem to recall that's where the office is and presumably where a lot of the staff are?

That too Bouncing