Mumsnet is the UK’s biggest parenting site, blog network, and forum. Hundreds of thousands of parents count on Mumsnet for advice and guidance.
What parents don’t know: all that advice and guidance is for sale.
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Yes, mumsnet told us that they would let us talk about myopia, if we paid them 25,000 pounds per week for the privilege. If UK parents want their children not to become myopic, we’d have to buy in to tell the story. Same as a lens manufacturer or LASIK clinic could. That’s troubling, especially since we aren’t talking about just ads. We are talking about native content, and the sale of the reader’s trust, very explicitly.
Here is exactly what happened.
Dozens of parents had asked us to get in touch with mumsnet to talk about the rapidly declining eyesight health of UK children. Since we know all about myopia, it’s risks and prevention methods, we should be helping to shed light on the myopia epidemic in the UK.
I was reluctant, since we aren’t in any way equipped to deal with a large volume of questions that could result in such a campaign.
No worries, they said. Just keep the site out of it, offer to just talk about eyesight health and prevention, without the context of #endmyopia.
Fine. I said all right, let’s talk to them.
I had Neha sign up for a forum membership, to offer to answer parent questions. We e-mailed mumsnet to talk a bit about myopia and the terrible effect it has on many of their readers children.
What happened next?
Mumsnet suspends Neha’s forum membership (which had no reference to this site or her practice, simply bringing up myopia as a topic). And then they e-mailed us. Now this is where things get interesting.
They didn’t e-mail us to say we did anything wrong. At all.
Instead, they e-mailed us with a sales pitch:
And we’re not just talking ad sales. Native content. Meaning, articles and blog posts. We were told that we’d be presented as experts, with charts and graphs and numbers of how many mumsnet readers we would be reaching.
Of course, that’s not shocking or surprising to those of us already jaded by the realities of news-for-profit. What is interesting is that mumsnet reader’s trust is so explicitly sold, and that you can basically just be an expert on anything, as long as you are willing to pay 25,000 UK pounds per week.
I’m leaving out the rates and names of sales people and e-mail details. I’m not against what they do. They are just one example of the larger problem.
The real issue here is to consider why you never hear about myopia causes, or rehabilitation, or even just the very real dangers of close-up and overprescription. Rehab practitioners can’t afford the fee to reach an audience. We aren’t making any money from sharing prevention minded content. Contact lens manufacturers will ad budgets of tens of millions of dollars, they can afford the rates, and profit from the message.
That’s the story. This is why no UK parents are going to be able to help their child keep their healthy eyesight. (And I probably can’t really afford to even say this, when they show up with their lawyers, demanding that we don’t talk about their ad practices.)
And all that, is sad news indeed.
