Mumsnet
Encyclopedia
Content and traffic
Mumsnet is Britain's busiest website for parents, hosting discussion forums where parents give and receive peer-to-peer parentingParenting
Parenting is the process of promoting and supporting the physical, emotional, social, and intellectual development of a child from infancy to adulthood...
support, as well as discussing a wide range of other topics. Currently, the site receives 570k site visits and 32m page views each month, and 1.5m monthly unique users make approximately 25,000 posts each day .
History
Mumsnet was set up in January 2000 by Justine Roberts, a sports journalist, and Carrie Longton, a TV producer. It is now in its eleventh year of operation.Mumsnet's 10th birthday party was hosted by Google
Google
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...
UK at their London headquarters in March 2010. Guests included Ed Miliband
Ed Miliband
Edward Samuel Miliband is a British Labour Party politician, currently the Leader of the Labour Party and Leader of the Opposition...
and Steve Hilton
Steve Hilton
Steve Hilton is the director of strategy for David Cameron, Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom...
, and both the then-Prime Minister, Gordon Brown
Gordon Brown
James Gordon Brown is a British Labour Party politician who was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Leader of the Labour Party from 2007 until 2010. He previously served as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Labour Government from 1997 to 2007...
, and his wife Sarah Brown gave speeches. Gordon Brown referred to Mumsnet as one of the great British institutions.. Mumsnet launched a site aimed at grandparents, Gransnet, on 5 May 2011 .
Mumsnet currently has 570k unique users per month (https://www.google.com/adplanner/planning/site_profile?hl=en#siteDetails?identifier=mumsnet.com&lp=true)
Media
In November 2009 newspaper articles spoke of the forthcoming UK general election as "the Mumsnet election", in part because mothers were regarded by politicians as key floating voterSwing vote
Swing vote is a term used to describe a vote that may go to any of a number of candidates in an election, or, in a two-party system, may go to either of the two dominant political parties...
s and online forums
Internet forum
An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are at least temporarily archived...
were seen as arenas in which their votes could be courted. The then prime minister and the leader of the opposition appeared on the website's webchats in quick succession, and this was widely reported. The site faced a barrage of publicity, not all of it favourable. Others have been dismissive of the importance of the site to politicians suggesting Mumsnet users comprise of a relatively narrow demographic. Toby Young
Toby Young
Toby Young, MA, FRSA is a British journalist and the author of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, the tale of his stint in New York as a contributing editor at Vanity Fair magazine...
argued that the site is full of Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
readers and "peopled exclusively by university-educated, upper-middle-class women who are only "swing voters" in the sense that they swing between voting Labour, Lib Dem and Green".
Mumsnet has become a popular resource for journalists, and discussions on the message boards have been cited in the press. Users of the site have sometimes felt that reproduction of Mumsnet discussions in the press is unwelcome, and the Daily Mail's
Daily Mail
The Daily Mail is a British daily middle-market tabloid newspaper owned by the Daily Mail and General Trust. First published in 1896 by Lord Northcliffe, it is the United Kingdom's second biggest-selling daily newspaper after The Sun. Its sister paper The Mail on Sunday was launched in 1982...
regular "This Week on Mumsnet" column generated controversy on the site in September 2009.
Webchats
The site has hosted webchats with celebrities and politicians, including former Prime Minister Gordon BrownGordon Brown
James Gordon Brown is a British Labour Party politician who was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Leader of the Labour Party from 2007 until 2010. He previously served as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Labour Government from 1997 to 2007...
, whose apparent failure under persistent (if ironic) questioning to reveal his favourite biscuit was cited in some quarters as evidence of a perceived indecisiveness. Roberts later explained that the question had not in fact been put to him. Prime Minister David Cameron
David Cameron
David William Donald Cameron is the current Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, First Lord of the Treasury, Minister for the Civil Service and Leader of the Conservative Party. Cameron represents Witney as its Member of Parliament ....
was challenged over the provision of free nappies for disabled children and UKIP leader Nigel Farage
Nigel Farage
Nigel Paul Farage MEP , a position he previously held from September 2006 to November 2009. He is a current Member of the European Parliament for South East England and co-chairs the Eurosceptic Europe of Freedom and Democracy group....
told Mumsnetters that a UKIP MEP Godfrey Bloom
Godfrey Bloom
Godfrey Bloom is a Member of the European Parliament for Yorkshire and the Humber for the United Kingdom Independence Party...
was "100% right" to say that "no self-respecting small businessman with a brain in the right place would ever employ a lady of child-bearing age."
Jamie Oliver, Dawn French and Gok Wan have all also taken part in Mumsnet webchats.
Mumsnet books
Mumsnet has published several parentingParenting
Parenting is the process of promoting and supporting the physical, emotional, social, and intellectual development of a child from infancy to adulthood...
books, based largely on the advice posted by the site's users since its launch in June 2000. These are Pregnancy: The Mumsnet Guide (2009), Toddlers: The Mumsnet Guide (2009) and Babies: The Mumsnet Guide (2010) . Their latest publication is The Mumsnet Rules which was published in 2011.
Lawsuit
In April 2006, lawyers acting for "childcare guru" and former maternity nurse Gina FordGina Ford
Gina Ford is a British writer on parenting methods and a former maternity nurse, without formal qualifications, who claims to have cared for over 300 babies during her career. Ford's 1999 book The Contented Little Baby Book advocates a daily routine for both the baby and the parents, with the day...
contacted Mumsnet, when some of the bulletins shifted from discussing Gina Ford's methods and advice to making personal attacks on her and her family. Her lawyers claimed that she was being libelled on a regular basis and requested immediate removal of the posts in question. After 12 months of discussion Mumsnet settled the dispute by apologising publicly to Gina Ford and making a contribution to her legal costs. In November 2010, Mumsnet co-founder Justine Roberts wrote to Prime Minister David Cameron, urging reform of the draft Defamation Bill to address the rise of online publication.
Campaigns
Mumsnet has initiated several national campaigns, and publicly supports a number of causes related to parenting.In response to forum users' experience with care and support in the NHS for miscarried pregnancies
Miscarriage
Miscarriage or spontaneous abortion is the spontaneous end of a pregnancy at a stage where the embryo or fetus is incapable of surviving independently, generally defined in humans at prior to 20 weeks of gestation...
, Mumsnet produced and released its Miscarriage Standard Code of Practice.
In January 2010, the site launched its Let Girls Be Girls campaign. The campaign challenged retailers to ensure that they did not contribute to the premature sexualisation of children through their products and marketing. In December 2010 Let Girls Be Girls was extended, and called for an end to the display of 'Lads' Mags' in children's view. This received the support of the main UK magazine retailers, with the exception of WHSmith.
In January 2011 Riven Vincent, a regular Mumsnet user with a severely disabled child, received widespread media attention after posting on the site about her despair in the face of local budget cuts. In response to Ms Vincent's plight, Mumsnet launched its Respite Care campaign, which calls on local authorities to provide adequate short breaks for families with disabled children.