We chat with Justine Roberts CBE, CEO and founder of Mumsnet, to discuss the responsibility of independent publishers, aligning mission and values with financial success, and being the first UK publisher to take legal action against OpenAI...

How do you define the intricate relationship between financial success and responsible business practices as an independent publisher?

Over the last 25 years we’ve always tried to grow Mumsnet sustainably and responsibly. We’re unique amongst premium UK publishers, in that much of our content is audience and community created. We have built a dedicated and loyal following that returns to Mumsnet day after day, with more than 50% of our 9m monthly users coming direct to us each month, and 25,000 new posts every day. To keep Mumsnet successful our platform needs to be user friendly and not over monetised, and so over this time we’ve kept it simple, with an effective but unobtrusive ad stack, premium advertisers and fast load times.

We’re lucky in that our users act as a 24/7 focus group - and if they don’t like something, they’ll tell us!  I think many other publishers in this time period have gone overboard with display ads and obtrusive formats, leading to a poor user experience and a decline in loyal audience and hence an overreliance on more transient search traffic - a dangerous downward cycle. We feel like our sustainable audience-first strategy has put us in a much stronger position than most. 

As we’ve grown, we’ve diversified - affiliate revenues based on both editorial in-depth testing and user forum recommendations has become a meaningful part of our business and we also have growing insights, endorsements, and licensing revenue streams, all of which leverage the uniqueness and power of the Mumsnet audience and brand. 

As an independent publisher, does your content align with your brand’s mission and values?

We’ve always been driven by our mission - to make parents’ lives easier - and our user-created content is the epitome of that mission. We have over 25,000 new posts and replies every day from Mumsnet users on everything from the best baby monitors to the practicalities of leaving an abusive marriage. Mumsnet is a trusted space for women to talk, ask questions, and seek guidance from people with similar experiences, and it's amazing to see this happen every day.

Everything we do results from an open dialogue with our users; we listen to their views on everything from the campaigns we run to the advertising we carry. As a business, we’re funded mainly by advertising, but the pursuit of profit isn't our central motivation. With this in mind, we won’t accept advertising from companies, for products or in formats that we believe are contrary to our mission - for example, we know that our users feel very strongly about MLMs, so they’re a hard ‘no’ for us.

We’re also really passionate about using the experiences women share on Mumsnet to fight for policy change on the issues that matter to them - from maternity care to parental leave to violence against women and girls. We have a campaigning arm that's dedicated to raising women’s voices in the corridors of power and securing meaningful policy change - all in line with our mission to make their lives easier. 

How do you compete with the advancement of AI? How can publishers interact with AI companies?

We’re probably in a better position than most when it comes to competing with AI. Much of our traffic comes to us direct and though it’s a piece of cake for an LLM to spit out a Mumsnet-style answer to a parenting question, I doubt they’ll ever be as funny about parking wars or as honest about relationships - and they’ll certainly never provide the emotional support that sees around a thousand women a year helped to leave abusive partners by other Mumsnet users. 

But the theft of publisher content is a real challenge. Mumsnet is home to 24 years of incredibly deep conversational data (around six billion words!) from real women talking about everything from raising kids to global politics. We believe the free scraping of publishers, large and small, represents a fundamental challenge to the viability of the open web, with LLMs building models with stolen content from the sites they are trying to replace. That's why we're the first UK media company to take legal action against Open AI and other AI scrapers.

That’s not to say that AI is all bad of course. It plainly has the potential to advance human progress and improve our lives in multiple ways. We licensed Open AI’s API to build MumsGPT - an own open-ended question tool that provides answers for brands based on real conversations between genuine Mumsnet users. But when we suggested that they might like to license our six billion plus words of content, they told us they weren’t interested.  And then they went ahead and stole it anyway.

The irony is that we’d love to work with companies like OpenAI, and use the billions of words of female-dominated conversation on Mumsnet to help tackle the misogyny that’s baked into most AI models. But if LLMs are allowed to simply steal and repurpose content from publishers and communities like Mumsnet they risk destroying them - leaving a handful of Silicon Valley giants will be left with even more control over the world’s content and commerce.

How can advertisers help independent publishers?

At Mumsnet we’re lucky that advertisers broadly have a great understanding of our brand, mission, and content, but I think there’s still an unwillingness to try to really understand the individual value independent publishers bring, and how important diversity of content is to supporting the open web. It often feels like advertisers, with stretched teams and budgets, take the easy route by partnering with either big tech or media conglomerates. The media ecosystem would be a much worse place without the hundreds of independent publishers that currently exist, and ad spend now is critical to keeping this diversity long term. 

I also think there is a largely outdated, and often lazy, approach to brand safety that misunderstands the nature and contextual relevance of independent publisher content, which can lead to unnecessary blocking and lack of investment. For example, Mumsnet reaches over 60% of pregnant women in the UK every month, and is a vital source of knowledge sharing and support for those prospective parents. This conversation drives amazing engagement, with average session times on our platform higher than both Reddit and Instagram, yet brands that want to reach our audiences often inadvertently block much of our pregnancy conversation by utilising one size fits all brand safety tagging. This approach means advertisers are missing out on amazing, contextually relevant, opportunities, just because they’re not taking the time to fully understand independent publishers, their niches, and audiences. 

The ad tech sector also needs to better support independent publishers. Many have small ad tech and programmatic teams, and the quantity and diversity of potential partners, both advertising and technology, can be quite hard for smaller publishers to navigate. The programmatic ecosystem in particular can be very opaque and independent publishers often lose out substantially. In one recent example we looked at working with a new video partner to bring in additional demand, and realised that due to other partners involved in their integration and various tech feeds, we’d only see just over 50% of the original media cost.  

That’s not to say there haven’t been some good progress in these areas, and companies like Ozone, The Independent Publisher Alliance, and the AOP, all of which Mumsnet works with, do a lot to provide support to and promote the value of independent publishers.