Unmade is two

Two years of analysis, audience-building and asking trade marketers to consider us

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Welcome to a birthday edition of Unmade.

We turn two today. Below, we share a progress report. And later in the post, we’ve an update on a slightly better day on The Unmade Index.

To celebrate Unmade’s birthday, we’ve a one-day flash sale. If you want to become a paying member the price will never be lower.

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Trade winds from the south

The Unmade team: Cat McGinn, Seja Al Zaidi, Belinda Cusack and Tim Burrowes

Tim Burrowes writes:

I was out for a walk along my favourite Tasmanian beach the other lunchtime. It seemed like a perfectly still day until I turned back and felt the wind in my face.

When the wind’s behind you, you don’t even notice.

As we hit two years of publishing Unmade, I find myself comparing it to the early years of Mumbrella, which I co-founded nearly 15 years ago. At the time, I didn’t even notice how much wind we had at our backs. Email had just become cheap. WordPress had just become stable enough to rely on as a publishing system. And social media, particularly Twitter, was a huge engine of engaged traffic.

This time round, while the wind has not been against us, it hasn’t been at our backs either. So while we’ve built our audience and our revenue and our team, it’s all felt slightly harder.

That’s the main thing about launching a publishing business for a second time. You’ve got a point of comparison which helps smooth the bumps. When you have a down day you can remind yourself that it’s normal for things to feel this difficult. And on good days you don’t get too carried away.

It’s been eight months since our last progress report, and now we’ve made it to two years, I plan to shift to an annual frequency for updates like this one.

Most importantly, before I get into the detail, it’s important to say our thanks to two groups of people we helped us get this far

We would not have made it to this point without our paying members. And we would not still be here without the support of what is so far a relatively small number of advertisers and sponsors.

I’ll come back to those two groups shortly.

So let’s start by catching you up on what’s happened since our last update.

When I wrote our our end of year update last December, we’d been through our first crisis. My business partner Damian Francis had gone back to Mumbrella and we were dealing with the aftermath of a $31,000 fraud which had wiped out our bank account.

Soon after we published the post (and not uncoincidentally, I suspect) the bank refunded the money. And our new team began to coalesce.

My former Mumbrella colleague Cat McGinn came on board to curate our retail media conference REmade (or RE:made, as we originally branded it, until we learned about how email filters hate colons). And Belinda Cusack took on the organising of the conference.

The Wiggles let themselves go: McGinn, Oster, Cusack and Burrowes at REmade

After the conference went well, we made it official. Back in March, Cat came on as Head of Curated & Commercial Content and Belinda signed on as Chief of Staff, charged with running the business side of our operations. Both are part time roles.

Soon afterwards, Seja Al Zaidi, briefly a reporter with Mumbrella and Auzbiz, came on board as our first full time journalist, charged with delivering our Tuesdata analysis for paying members and producing the Unmade podcast.

It all feels like a lot more than six months have passed since then.

Those hires coincided with another gear change.

For our first year, we were funded by Substack. Part of the deal was that we didn’t take ads; Substack champions subscriptions, not advertising, as the future of journalism. That was fine by me while we built our audience but my view (borrowed from The Rebooting’s Brian Morrissey) is that the best number of revenue streams is several.

Late last year, we turned on our advertising. Naively, considering I’ve been through exactly the same pain before in the early days of Mumbrella, I assumed that once we built it, they would come.

We offered the freshest database in the industry, a high-involvement environment (notice how far you’ve got already in reading this?) in a market dominated by press release write-throughs, and extremely competitive pricing for our ads. A no brainer, right?

I say naive, because inertia is a big thing.

So a handful of advertisers supported us from the beginning, including ThinkNewsBrands, SCA, Paramount and News Corp. Others followed. But there were some who our sales representatives at We Think Media struggled to get time with, which was doubly frustrating when I could see from our analytics that their bosses were reading us every day.

Other trade marketers take more persuasion to try something new. With Unmade email-led, with a maximum of one piece of long form content per day, there’s no direct point of comparison.

It reminds me of the first couple of years of Mumbrella when we were trying to persuade trade marketers used to advertising only in the printed pages of the then weekly editions of AdNews and B&T, that online advertising was worth considering.

Slowly though, it’s starting to turn. As we enter upfronts season, we’ve got more bookings coming through.

So how have we gone commercially?

First to our overall numbers (by the way, this comes from Xero rather than our tax accounts, which we haven’t yet filed for FY23.)

In our first financial year (FY22) we had a turnover of $143,000 and a net profit of $4,700. In FY23, that almost doubled (admittedly off that low base) to $273,000, with a loss of $17,700. Our working capital is covered via a directors loan from me. This year we’re targeting another doubling to $500,000.

Like they always do, those numbers hide a few things. I’d like to be able to start taking a salary. Other than super, I haven’t yet been taking one. But the business needs to grow to the point where it can support that.

And those different streams of revenue come at varying costs.

We hold on to about 85% of membership revenue (after Substack and banking fees).

Our advertising sales repping arrangement is commercial in confidence, but, as is the norm, includes both retainer and commission. The same goes for sponsorship for our conferences.

REmade was almost a sellout

And ticket sales are balanced against the costs of venue hire and catering.

My favourite revenue stream is that of membership. For the most part, it’s recurring revenue, which gives greater certainty.

In recent days, we’ve finally broken a key six figure barrier in gross reader revenue.

Our current gross annualized revenue is US$64,436 (Substack reports in US dollars) which is $100,300, based on current exchange rates.

Our next job is to wean ourselves off discount offers. It’s unlikely we’ll do many more of the sort of flash sale we are running today which offers a permanent 44% off. Ahem.

Instead, we’ll focus on building up the value for subscribers. Our archive, which goes behind the paywall after two months is growing. And member discounts on our conferences start to stack up.

But our overall audience numbers are also important, including subscribers to the free tier, which makes up most readers. Those are people our advertisers want to talk to, and are indeed the funnel into more paying members of whom there are currently 282.

The next goal is to break 20,000 subscribers by Christmas.

Meanwhile, we recently passed 2m views.

So far, we haven’t optimised for views. You’ll be aware that, particularly on a Saturday, we put several pieces of analysis in the same email-first post. Most of our reading still takes place within email, rather than on the web.

That’s not entirely surprising, as we choose to include the whole post in the email. Because we don’t yet have a web-first advertising component (those ads that appear in the newsletter appear on the web too) we don’t need to change that yet.

A well performing post will get around 8,000 opens. Arguably, that’s more eyeballs on a single article than anywhere else across Australia’s marketing trade media.

The bigger philosophical question for us, is at what point we should shift from being email-first to web-first? Potentially it created greater advertising revenue opportunities, and also the chance to add an extra component to our content. Being unable to make our graphs interactive is one frustration for instance.

To be honest, I had anticipated that at this stage the move to web-first would already be pressing, to accommodate advertising. But as our email ad inventory isn’t yet selling out, that stretches the timeline. Plus I love the way that Substack almost seamlessly manages paying subscribers. I’d miss that.

Another stat to share is the podcast. We’ve hit 66,400 downloads. I love doing it, and love working with the team at Abe’s Audio, particularly Abe Udy who you’ll know from our Start the Week podcast.

And one of the best things about being in startup phase is the ability to do something interesting simply because it is interesting.

For me, the single most intriguing thing we’ve done this year was diving into AI. That included our HumAIn event, which was Australia’s first conference on the impact of AI on marketing.

Alongside HumAIn came TimBot. We built TimBot in collaboration with Nic Hodges at generative AI consultancy Move 37.

Now TimBot speaks aloud too

TimBot is a media expert, trained on the content of Unmade and my book Media Unmade.

But what makes TimBot even more magical is that, having trained him on the audio recordings of the book, along with the Unmade podcast, he now speaks, in my voice. It’s uncanny enough that I’ve removed voice ID from my banking app.

Please give TimBot a try (but please be patient, the audio version of the words sometimes takes a minute to emerge; he’s still a prototype) and tell us what you think.

Another thing we’ve been running since the start of last year is The Unmade Index, which tracks the performance of our listed media and marketing companies. Produced each day by Rosa Oster, the index tracks the relative performance of our sector. Without the index, I’m not sure I’d have realised just how far off our media stocks are since the end of the pandemic.

Speaking of which, back in April, I decided to get into the game myself, buying shares in most of the Unmade Media stocks, via my self managed super fund. The amounts are not life changing - a few hundred dollars in each one. As you’ll see from the table below, for the most part, they’ve been bad investments. News Corp was the only major exception, while Seven West Media has done worst since then.

The other noticeable thing about writing this update is that while it’s longer than it should be, I’ve also been forced to leave so much out. That’s a good sign.

And just you wait until the wind turns.

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Reprieve on the Unmade index

Seja Al Zaidi writes:

Relative calm returned to the Unmade Index on Tuesday which swung up by 0.87% to land at 648.8 points.

Positive performances on the part of the three biggest stocks was largely what led the lift. Domain saw the highest increase in its share price - up 2.20% - while its parent company Nine and Ooh Media followed with a respective 1.25% and 1.03% lift.

ARN Media continued to see pressure on its share price. It fell 3.50% yesterday while rival Southern Cross Austereo dropped 0.64%.

Nine and ARN media are both due to update the market on their financial performances tomorrow.

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Time to leave you to your Wednesday.

Don’t forget - the discount on today’s birthday flash sale won’t be repeated. So if you want to become a paying member of Unmade there’ll never be a better time.

If you appreciate our independent analysis, one way to support that is by becoming a paying member.

Another way to help us is, if you work in an organisation that promotes itself to our industry but isn’t yet doing so on Unmade, to ask your trade marketing colleague why not.

We’ll be back with an audio-led edition tomorrow. Have a great day.

Toodlepip…

Tim Burrowes

Publisher - Unmade

tim@unmade.media