MSE Discussion: MoneySavingExpert.com to join the MoneySupermarket.com group

DevilInDisguise wrote: »

You're wrong.

You own the copyright to anything that you post on this forum. Upon posting it, you give MSE the right to use it as they wish.

Actually, you are wrong, or more correctly ignorant of the facts due to you not being able to understand what you read, or put two things together.


Why don't you try again..... I will help you through it.

Originally Posted by deeplyblue
I entirely agree that legally Martin has not sold anything he was not entitled to sell.

I also noticed when I signed up that anything I posted immediately became the property of MSE, and that I was not, therefore, entitled to post the same bit of text anywhere else without the written permission of MSE. Occasionally I wondered if it would be worth re-posting some of the stuff I posted on one topic on another web, just to test that rule.

Notice the text I have made bold, you are thinking in terms of now, but deeplyblue is talking in terms of when they joined, which was 2008.

Back around that time I remember a "discussion" about martin being a coward, after he said "I only fight fight's I know I can win".

I was one of those who called him a coward, and I cited the T&Cs (as they were at the time) as an example of his cowardice.

At the time, one term was very clear, once you post anything in his forum he owns it lock stock and barrel, he owns the copyright and you give up any rights you had to it. However, further down another term said clearly that he was in no way responsible for any post made on his forum, the poster remains solely responsible for what is posted.

As I said then, he was just after making money from the posts, claiming he owned them but was not man enough to take responsibility for them.

So deeplyblue's post is not wrong, as he/she is talking about when he/she joined, not when you joined.

mbailey wrote: »

A happy day for Martin, but a Very Sad day for MSE. :-(

To me the main advantage of MSE was independence and to know what was being said had no bias. Ok so for 3 years we might still have that, but after 3 years have passed and Martin has left what will be left of MSE...

If we take the example of financial products, for years Martin has been telling us to goto a true independent financial advisor who is not tied to any lender. Taking Martin's own advice, MSE can now no longer be trusted.

A sad day for money saving. :-(

There's actually a lot of truth in your post.

The problem is when a website becomes so popular that it attracts millions of eyeballs it then becomes EXTREMELY attractive for larger corporations to buy it.

We can't really blame Martin. Would you stick to your principles and continue running an unbiased site or pocket £ 87 million ?

john_charles wrote: »

Quite sad to hear the news that ML has sold out, but for that money can you blame him?

No, I can't blame him. I may not like it, but I can't blame him as he only started the site to make money.

The problem now is, it is owned by "someone" who want's to make a lot more money out of us even faster than martin was.

They won't want to wait years to get their money back and start making a profit, there's no guarantee this site will still be profitable in a couple of years. So they will be looking to make money fast.

I wonder if they realise that there are only two things on this site worth anything, the users and the team that scour the threads picking out the posts that contain very useful information.

Why are people calling him a sell out. Let me repeat this....MoneySavingExpert has been a revenue making website for a number of years.

Last year he made £ 16 million from advertising revenue, The previous year he made around £ 11.5 million from advertising revenue on MSE.

So when exactly did he "sell out" ? The moment he sold his site for £ 87 million or the moment he started making money from his website ?

Or the moment he made his first million ??

Occy wrote: »

Well... is it a massive investment?

to quote the BBC article:



This would imply that MS was paying MSE close to £10m a year so buying out MSE effectively saves them that £10m + they get the other £6m on top, I am sure there isn't many other ways to achieve an 18% annual return on your investment.

If those revenue streams continue, perhaps.

The figures do raise an interesting point however. Doesn't 59% of revenue coming from one single company's affiliate programme seem awfully high for an 'independent' site?