Unmade is four: Back in the fold
Welcome to an end of week update from Unmade.
Today marks our fourth birthday. As is my habit, I’ll be updating you on the year just gone, and sharing some news on where we go next.
And further down, the Unmade Index runs out of steam.
It’s your last chance to sign up to a paid membership of Unmade and lock in all of the current benefits. In a few weeks’ time, we’re going to stop accepting new paying members of Unmade. Instead we’ll be offering membership of an expanded Mumbrella Pro as we bring the two brands closer together.
All Unmade membership perks will be carried across, including complimentary tickets to REmade, Unlock and Compass for our annual paying members. These won’t be available to anyone else as part of the new Mumbrella Pro membership.
Your paid membership also includes exclusive analysis, and access to our content archive which goes behind the paywall six weeks after publication.
Upgrade now or miss out.
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Four years of Unmade
Over the last few days, I mentioned to a few people that I was about to write Unmade’s fourth birthday update. Each time, they were surprised it’s been four years already. Me too.
Once again it was a year where lots changed for Unmade. But that’s publishing. And lots more is going to change this coming year. But I’ll come on to that.
First, the point of this post.
I’ve been writing similar annual articles since we started Mumbrella in 2008. I try to give as much of a picture as I can into the realities of running a media business. From a self interested point of view, it makes it slightly easier to argue for transparency when I interview other media bosses.
This time, our numbers come with the caveat that our merger with Mumbrella in January changed the trajectory of the business. If Unmade had continued its own race, I suspect that our revenues would have been a little higher and the profit would be a little lower. I’ll explain why after the graphs.
First, the revenue:
These numbers come from our unaudited Xero accounts, and each of the bars covers the July to June financial year.
As you’ll see Unmade’s revenue growth continued. We hit $880,000 in revenue which wasn’t bad for our fourth year. That mix included membership of about $100,000 (flat on the year before); event ticket sales, plus advertising and event sponsorship. REmade, HumAIn, Compass and Unlock were Unmade’s main events.
While all our events were successful in content terms (and more importantly, community building), their contribution to the business was more mixed.
REmade, focused on retail media, has been our biggest success in terms of both tickets and sponsorship. Turning Compass into a six-state roadshow was one of the things I was proudest of last year. Unlock had great content for anyone interested in marketing within the 24 hour economy, but we were a little late to get it into the market (we’re bringing it back this October). And HumAIn was most frustrating - we created a genuine community of like minded, AI-curious individuals but were unable to attract significant sponsorship.
We came tantalisingly close to the $1m revenue mark in the 2025 financial year. While I don’t think we would have quite got there, we would have got a little closer if not for the Mumbrella merger. Some of our focus shifted (in a good way, I think).
By the same token, our profit number(artificially) jumped:
Our Xero numbers show a profit of nearly $67,000, which created a nice hockey stick graph after last year’s loss of $17,000.
But that profit number was assisted by staff salary costs gradually moving across to the separate Mumbrella Media bank account in the months that followed the merger.
In the alternate timeline we’d have done a little more under the Unmade banner that would have grown revenue a bit more, but our costs would have been such that we’d have, I reckon, broken even at best, and probably stayed slightly loss making.
Meanwhile, Unmade’s email database moved back past 20,000 - we’re up to 21,769 at the time of writing.
You’ll see the drop off on the chart this time last year. As I wrote at the time, we culled about 4,000 emails that were no longer active (tip to trade marketers: ask our rivals how often they do that).
We’ll do the same thing again soon, when we bring Unmade into the same back end systems as Mumbrella.
Which incidentally is the main update on how Unmade will evolve.
As I alluded to, at the start of this year, things took a new turn. I joined Simon Grover’s The Intermedia Group as co-owners of Mumbrella. If you weren’t around at the time, I was one of the three shareholders who sold Mumbrella to Diversified Communications seven years earlier.
We put Unmade and Mumbrella into a new TIG division called Mumbrella Media and brought together our two teams.
Cat McGinn and Belinda Cusack, who were key to Unmade’s development, both came across with me. Belinda is now Mumbrella Media’s chief of staff and is also leading the development of the Mumbrella Pro membership model. And Cat McGinn now has the mammoth task of leading curation across all of Mumbrella Media’s many events. That still includes the likes of REmade and Unlock, and also established Mumbrella events like the marketing summits, CommsCon and Mumbrella360. That’s a homecoming for Cat who was with Mumbrella in its early years.
To be transparent, not everything went to plan. We were sorry to see our head of partnerships Clive Prosser head across town to join Misfits Media, the people who publish B&T.
It was also a personal adjustment for me. Having made the early Covid move to Tasmania, I’ve now been travelling to Sydney for half of each week. That’s not sustainable (in personal or carbon credit terms). I plan to move back to Sydney as soon as I can get my act together (and figure out the cat transport logistics).
But I’ve loved being back in an actual office for at least part of the week. And the Intermedia warehouse space in Glebe, with old and new printed magazines piled around us, is an absolute homecoming.
The integration with Mumbrella is speeding up as we figure out how the two brands sit next to each other. The way we see it, Mumbrella’s focus is to be always on, and a first cut at the news of the day, while Unmade is analytical and long form.
There’s one impracticality we will solve soon: At present, Unmade lives inside Substack while Mumbrella is published within Wordpress, while its daily news emails go out via Hubspot. That’s not very practical.
So Unmade will finally, mostly, leave Substack and live in the same back end of Mumbrella.
For business reasons that makes some sense. The ads you see on this page have been manually placed, in image slots, rather than being served automatically.
That’s because Substack prefers the model of paid memberships over advertising. But we’re fortunate enough to be in a world where advertisers are still willing to pay a premium to speak to a narrow niche of people. We still like ads.
When the day comes (and we’ve set that as Monday October 6) I’ll be a little sad. Substack was a wonderful platform to work from as a solo operator. I’d recommend it to anyone who does not have advertising as a key revenue stream. Substack was magnificent at managing subscriptions, and has kept improving. The network effect of signups has finally begun to kick in too.
When we make the switch, Unmade’s publishing time will formalise on weekdays to an end-of-day message.
That will include an update on the day’s trading on the Unmade Index and a daily piece of analysis. We’ll also be unveiling a new stable of columnists, published on a weekly or fortnightly rotation. Each column will appear first in the Unmade email.
My Saturday morning Best of the Week column will remain email-first and go to both Unmade and Mumbrella readers. (Best of the Week started life in Mumbrella in the first place, by the way. Next week, on August 26 will be the eighth anniversary of me writing it. It feels longer.)
Unmade’s paid membership and the Mumbrella Pro tier will also become one thing. We’ll also be turning on a paywall for Mumbrella’s 17-year archive of content. Like Unmade, everything will go behind the Mumbrella Pro paywall six weeks after publication.
For our loyal paying subscribers of Unmade, we’ll of course honour the lifetime level of whatever paid subscription price you signed up for. If you are a paying member, we’ve already sent you details of how to start using Mumbrella Pro; message us if you can’t find that, by the way.
We’ll also be combining the two databases for what we believe should be the single biggest, and certainly freshest email database of industry readers - more than 60,000 people receiving the Mumbrella news email in the morning and the Unmade analysis email in the early evening.
We’ll have more to say about Mumbrella Pro in the coming weeks.
That said, I want to maintain a toehold in the Substack world. So we plan to go on publishing the Unmade podcast (which has now had 183,000 downloads, by the way) via Substack. When we make the rest of the switch, those emails will start coming from Substack rather than unmade.media.
Speaking of our advertisers, I offer my sincere thanks to the advertisers and sponsors who got Unmade here. We wouldn’t have been able to do it through membership support alone.
And this is likely to be the last Unmade-specific annual update. You’ll still hear from me though. Mumbrella’s 17th birthday update is due on December 9. The last time I was able to update it as an owner was at the end of 2017. At that point, Mumbrella had just passed $7m in revenue and $1m in profit. How is Mumbrella Media travelling now? You’ll have to wait until December to find out.
By the way, if you’re part of the publishing industry and enjoyed reading this, please do come to our revived Publish conference in Sydney on October 28. We hope it will be a room full of people sharing their own experiences in the same way we have here.
Our previous updates:
Gravity recaptures Unmade Index
The Unmade Index’s upwards charge came to a halt on Thursday despite the wider ASX All Ordinaries hitting new heights.
The biggest stock on the Index, Nine, lost 0.6% with major shareholder Perpetual revealing to the ASX that it had sold down its stake from 10% to 8.8%.
Meanwhile Seven West Media lost 3.2% and Ooh Media slipped back below a $900m market capitalisation, losing 2.1%.
The two audio stocks improved with ARN Media growing by 4.4% and Southern Cross Austereo rising by 2.3%
The Unmade Index closed on 589.1 points, down by 0.47% for the day.
More from Mumbrella…
‘A crack in the wall’: Meta accused of inflating Shops ad performance
Jane Palfreyman steps into SBS acting managing director role
Opinion: Cosmetic advertising is under fire: What agencies must know before September 2
Time to leave you to your day.
I’ll be back with Best of the Week tomorrow.
Have a great day
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher - Unmade + Mumbrella
tim@unmade.media
Congratulations!