Unmade is three - here's what's new
Welcome to a birthday update from Unmade. We’ve turned three. Below, we share some data about how we’ve gone so far, and we reveal a big upgrade to the privileges of membership. Maybe you should upgrade today
Lifting off - Unmade turns three
Quite often, people ask how Unmade is going.
I’ve never been a fan of the whole “fake it til you make it” schtick, so I try to be honest. This is my second experience of launching a media and marketing masthead in Australia, and it’s harder than it was with Mumbrella. I wrote about that in our two year anniversary update.
“We’re flapping our wings twice as hard, and we’re taking twice as long to get into the air,” is the phrase I’ve used more than once over the last few months when I’ve compared the two experiences.
And it’s true - this time our audience, revenues and team have all grown more slowly. The market’s more crowded (which, let’s face it, is at least partly my fault), the platforms are less generous with sending traffic (Twitter and LinkedIn seem to hate Substack links in particular) and we miss out on certain advertisers who want guaranteed editorial coverage (yes, really).
But nonetheless, we’ve grown. In a moment I’ll share some numbers. I don’t want to bury the lede, so here are a couple of key announcements for which I’ll expand on the details further down: 1. Unmade’s annual paid membership will now include a ticket to all of our events; and 2. We’re announcing a new event, Unlock, on October 31 which focuses on marketing within the nighttime economy.
To stick with the flying analogy, Unmade feels like a plane rumbling down the runway. It’s taken us time to gain speed, but we’ve finally reached V2, the moment where we can lift the nose and take off. We’ve started to figure out what Unmade is, what it isn’t, and who it’s for.
First to our financials. The first graph looks more impressive than the second.
As you’ll see, revenue have now reached just over $550,000. That’s from four sources: Advertising on the newsletter; sponsorship of our events; ticket sales; and our paying members.
Profits, as you might expect from a new business, are lumpier. Indeed, a more accurate word than profits would be losses.
We made a modest profit of $4,700 in FY22, a loss of $22,600 in FY23 and a loss of FY23,700 in FY24.
Cashflow early in this financial year currently looks pretty good. Two months in, we’re solidly profitable. Even in this economy.
Another metric: On August 9, we hit 22,468 email addresses on our database for our daily email. And then we decided to have a cull.
Substack, which is the newsletter platform we use, doesn’t automatically delete email addresses when people leave jobs and they start bouncing back. When we sent our EDM from another platform to promote the end of the earlybird discount for REmade a few days ago, we noticed we were getting a little over 4,000 hard bounces.
We decided to manually delete them from the system. We could have left it until after today’s reader update so we had a nice upwards graph. But I’d rather be transparent. And, less altruistically, I hope it inspires a question from trade marketers to some of our rivals who have been known to make some unlikely claims about the size of their database that only seem feasible if they haven’t removed dead addresses in a couple of decades.
Speaking of the trade press, as the sixth (?) largest newsletter focused on the media and marketing sector (after B&T, Mumbrella, Media Week, Mi3 and AdNews, probably in that order) the only legitimacy Unmade can bring is to offer something genuinely different.
Our strategy around events is to look for developing niches and communities within the media and marketing community rather than lookalike events.
REmade - Retail Media Unmade is our best example so far. We’ll be running it for a third time in just over five weeks. Thanks to our curator Cat McGinn’s work, I think we’ve earned a place within the retail media community.
As a result, REmade has also been a commercial success with strong sponsorship and ticket sales.
HumAIn, focusing on the revolution that generative AI is bringing to the marketing world, was a more mixed result. I was proud of the program Cat put together, and we had good ticket sales, but there was no sponsorship, so that was more of a breakeven event. Perhaps we were too early for there to be sponsors with products to talk about.
Regardless, it’s too important a subject to ignore, so we will do HumAIn again next year.
I’m also delighted to today reveal our next event. Unlock takes place in Sydney on October 31. Unlock’s key supporter is the NSW Government, and Unlock will be co-located with Neon Forum which is being run by the Office of the 24 Hour Economy Commissioner.
We’ll have lots more on Unlock in the coming weeks. But for those with an interest in contributing to the program, Cat McGinn will be doing the curation - cat@unmade.media.
And for potential commercial partners, Clive Prosser is on clive@unmade.media.
Speaking of Clive, as we announced a few weeks back, he joined us last month as Partnerships Director after seven years running Advertising Week APAC. Incidentally, Clive is in Perth next week for State of Social if anybody in WA wants to catch up with him.
Clive’s arrival at Unmade is another sign of us reaching takeoff speed.
Since launching advertising on the newsletter two years ago, we’ve been repped by We Think Media. They’ve proved to be wonderful people to work with, and without them we wouldn’t have got to the scale where we can now take our sales inhouse.
Sticking with points of difference, editorially we try to offer that by staying away from commoditised, press release-based news, and aiming to offer insights and analysis that can’t be read anywhere else that day.
And the other place we’re trying to be different is in our business model. I’m still convinced that the repeatable revenues of paying subscribers is where our long term future lies.
The greater the proportion of reader funding a publication has, the more fearless it can be in calling things as it sees them. The trade press currently swills with grim stories out of one masthead in particular where advertisers (or their PR people) have been able to pick up the phone about something they didn’t like and have an editorial person replaced by somebody who will write nicer things.
Last year about $100,000 of Unmade’s revenue came from paying members. That was pretty much flat on the year before. Which brings me to our big update.
It’s time for us to add more value to what our paying members get for their $650 per year.
Instead of a 30% discount on event tickets and a free ticket to our end-of-year event Compass, our annual paying members will now be able to attend all of our conferences for free. Yes, all of them. And Compass will be bigger this year too - we’re doing it in six cities.
That might seem a little odd when the full ticket price for REmade alone is $675. An Unmade member attending our main conferences will get more than $2,000 in value for their $650 membership.
The attraction of the business model for us is the predictability of recurring revenue. Where somebody is a paying member, we want them to feel they get more than enough value to renew every year.
Those who supported us in our first years and got in at the introductory rate are now getting even more of that value. And it turns out that Mark Ritson was right. We will no longer be offering discount offers on Unmade memberships.
Something that de-risks this move for us, is that currently there’s very little crossover between our 300 or so paid members and those who have historically bought tickets to our events.
It also helps change our own psychology to genuinely think of our paying supporters as members, not just subscribers. I attend the IAB’s various summits and I’m struck that there often seems to be a warmth in the room. I suspect that’s in part because it is a community of members.
Paid membership also creates a flywheel effect which is only just cranking into motion for Unmade. The more revenue there is, the more journalists we can hire to create content worth paying for once it goes behind the paywall.
That said, we’ve also been developing a band of advertisers and sponsors who have supported us even though they know they don’t get to buy any editorial. Without them, we’d still be on the runway.
And that’s why those who haven’t yet seen the value in a paid membership but still read us also make an important contribution. Just by opening the daily newsletter and giving us your attention, you justify the support of our advertisers.
I also have to acknowledge the support of Abe’s Audio. Without Abe Udy’s passion for podcasting, that’s a dimension that Unmade would be missing.
We’re finally in the air. Thanks for coming along. Now please consider upgrading to a membership.
Unmade Index drops further into the basement
The Unmade Index fell a further 0.46% into its most negative territory since its launch, yesterday. Our index of ASX-listed media and marketing companies closed at 463.1 points.
The worst performer was Ooh Media which lost 6.67% as the market continued to contemplate Wednesday’s half year update. So far this week, Ooh has lost nearly 10% of its market capitalisation. It is now trading close to its lowest point since last November.
We’ll be back with more soon.
A quick reminder to those thinking of entering the REmade Awards. Tomorrow is the last day before the late entry fee kicks in.
Have a great day.
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher - Unmade
tim@unmade.media
Love the transparency as always TB. Reminds me of the best piece of advice I ever got before launching - and I then ignored in my hubris - double the time, double the cost and halve the revenue - and if you can make that work then you may just have something.