Members of Australian Facebook page for mums are outraged after the page’s administrator explained they will be charged a retrospective joining fee if they wish to remain members of the private group.
Mums the Word is a closed community group that provides advice and support to parents plus puts them in direct contact with contractors like babysitters. Like most closed Facebook groups, the group with 24,000 members has been run without a joining fee, until now.
In a Facebook post titled ‘The future of this group’ the group’s administrator outlined the ‘difficult decision’ to enforce a $10 fee. She claimed the fee will cover the costs of running and monitoring the popular page.
“Managing and monitoring this wonderful Facebook page is a 24/7 job for me,” she wrote, “I get messages on weekends, late at night, from 5:30am and everything in between and if I don’t respond they just keep coming.”
“I ask that if you have ever found this group useful, if it’s every helped you find a babysitter, plumber, cleaning tip, baby support, parenting advice or anything at all and you’d like to give back or support then you can just click this safe and secure PayPal link.”
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Speaking to Kidspot the moderator assured, “the money will go into a business account which will distribute a small weekly salary to keep the group running.”
Mums the Word moderator’s post outlining her decision to charge members a fee.
Some members were happy to pay the fee and have done so already. However, some members weren’t so quick to hand over their money and instead are concerned that a fee will deter members and diminish the page which is reliant on a community of shared information.
“I’m concerned at how few people you will have left of this page once you remove those who don’t pay,” wrote member adding: “Also, I highly doubt you will have people joining a page where they are charged when they have zero idea if this page would be worth it, thereby completely negating the value that a number of people on this page actually provides.”
Members posted their concerns under the page administrator’s post.
Meanwhile other members were quick to do the maths and revealed that if every existing member were to pay the page’s new fee of $10, the pager’s moderator’s would take home a whopping $240,000.
While many members agreed the moderator’s deserve a salary, or some sort of income for their work moderating the page, they instead suggested other ways of monetising the page, such as opening it up to advertisers.
