Welcome to an unscheduled update from Unmade. We bring some significant news: We’re part of a team that is buying Mumbrella. The details are below.
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Mumbrella, under new management
We start the year with an exciting piece of news. Unmade and Mumbrella are coming together.
Next Tuesday, a new company, Mumbrella Media, will officially take ownership of Mumbrella from Diversified Communications. Unmade will also be part of the new group.
Alongside majority owner The Intermedia Group, I will be a shareholder in Mumbrella Media. We’ll be based at Intermedia’s office in Glebe. Intermedia‘s stable of 30 digital mastheads, 20 events and 19 print magazines includes titles such as National Liquor News, Retailbiz, Australian Hotelier and Hospitality magazine.

All of the Unmade team are coming over, along with any of the Mumbrella team who wish to do so (which I hope is all of them; they only heard the news a few minutes ago). I’ll be Mumbrella Media’s publisher and managing director.
Let’s catch you up on the history. Mumbrella is now 16 years old. I wrote the first post on Mumbrella on December 9, 2008.
We sold Mumbrella to Diversified Communications in late 2017. At the time there were three shareholders - Martin Lane, Ian Wakeling and myself. For the first two years, Martin and myself continued to run the business until handing over management control to Diversified early in 2020.
With some personal reasons for moving back to the UK for what ended up being half a year, I left Mumbrella in 2021 and worked on Unmade from over there. Unmade picked up momentum once I got back to Australia in 2022.
You can read my annual Unmade updates here:
When it comes to editorial ethos, Mumbrella and Unmade are twins, albeit non-identical. Unmade has the same organising thought with which we started Mumbrella back in the day - our job is to help our audience in their working lives and careers by doing our best to tell it like it is.
In the case of Mumbrella, it was about being web-first and comprehensive - everything under the media and marketing umbrella, if you will. The events side of the business followed later.
With Unmade, we have operated email-first, thanks in part to first year funding from Substack. And we have been selective in our coverage, usually just one or two in-depth, analytical pieces per day. Plus, of course, the Unmade Index.
Unmade has also focused on specialist niches - building a community around retail media in REmade, in AI for the marketing world in HumAIn, and late last year Unlock, tackling the night time economy. Our Compass roadshow was a unique six-state, end-of-year tour. All of those will continue, with the added heft of Mumbrella and Intermedia behind them.
And for Unmade’s paying members, your privileges - including tickets to REmade, HumAIn, Unlock and Compass - will of course be honoured
This all came together quite quickly. Being publisher is a full time job, so in the short term, I may be writing less for Unmade as we bring the teams together, but I will still be writing.
One benefit of having done Unmade for the last three-and-a-half years is that I am better equipped to be publisher of Mumbrella Media than I would have been before. Last time round, I was the content guy, and contributed to strategy as a shareholder and director.
Nowadays I know how to log in to Xero. Unmade, where I was the only shareholder and director, and responsible for running the business (with much help from our chief of staff Belinda Cusack) has been as big a learning curve as I’ve ever faced. I continue to feel imposter syndrome having the title CEO in my LinkedIn.
I’m also conscious that Unmade’s momentum (note: I can’t quite bring myself to use the word success in case it sounds like hubris) has come thanks to the support of our readers and advertisers.
We grew from turnover of $148,000 in FY22, to $287,000 in FY23, to $554,000 in FY24. In just the first half of this financial year we wrote almost the same revenue - $493,000 - as we did in the whole of the previous year.
It’s Unmade’s success (there, I said it) which has delivered us the means of playing ourselves into this deal, which will be good for both Unmade and Mumbrella.
But publishing is still hard, particularly in this environment.
How we refocus Mumbrella (and Unmade alongside it) will follow. In the seven years since I was last an owner, the world, and Mumbrella itself, has changed. And the detail of that deserves to be in a post on Mumbrella after we get the keys to the house next week.
Good times.
Time to leave you to your Monday, as we enter what feels like the last week of the year we can possibly think of as the Christmas break. We’ll be back with more soon.
Have a great day.
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher - Unmade (and, soon, Mumbrella)
tim@unmade.media
Well done. I suppose this makes Tim "the new Kerry Packer" - selling a business and then buying it back three years later?
Good on you Tim. Looking forward to new energy in Mumbrella.