Mumbrella’s next phase
Mumbrella’s archive is going behind a paywall. It’s part of a bigger plan. In this post, Mumbrella’s founder Tim Burrowes explains what comes next.
Mumbrella publisher Tim Burrowes co-founded the business in 2008, sold it in 2017, and bought it back (as a co-owner with Intermedia) in 2025
Back in 2011 when News Corp switched on the paywall for The Australian, one of the executives joked that the public’s ten-year free trial was coming to an end.
You could say the same thing about Mumbrella, except it’s been nearly 17 years. This afternoon we pressed the button. If you want to see articles that are older than six weeks old, you’ll need to be a subscriber to Mumbrella Pro.
It’s part of a larger project to bring the content of Mumbrella and Unmade together on one platform. On Saturday, we sent the final Unmade newsletter via Substack. From now on, Unmade’s analytical content will be published via Mumbrella’s WordPress platform.
We’ve been long time believers in a membership tier for Mumbrella. We acquired the then 40-year-old title AdBrief from Thomson Reuters back in 2012. We then relaunched it as The Source in 2013. This was our first run at creating an industry intelligence tool, offering members comprehensive contacts and information on the activities of Australia’s biggest brands and agencies.
And in 2019, we folded The Source into Mumbrella, and launched the membership tier Mumbrella Pro. As well as the directory of brands and agencies, we began to share content from our conferences. It was the first time we’d effectively had a paid content tier.
By that point, we’d sold Mumbrella and five months later, we handed over management control of the business. As was their right, the new owners chose other priorities, and the new Mumbrella Pro was not marketed. Gradually, updating the directory content fell by the wayside. Revenue that had been approaching $100,000 per year fell away to what is now about $30,000.
While I was away from the Mumbrella mothership, I had the opportunity to explore my own paid membership model with Unmade. That experience helped convince me that the business model of publishing requires that content worth paying for, should indeed be paid for. The audience of exclusively advertising-supported media gets what it pays for.
With Unmade, we created a membership model with an annual fee of $650 which included access to member-only content, our archive, and free access to our events. Our annual revenue from Unmade’s paying members has reached just over $125,000.
Behind the scenes we’ve been working with our wonderful technology partner The Code Co, along with the inhouse team at The Intermedia Group. The Code Co has been involved with Mumbella for most of our existence. You may have noticed Mumbrella had a bit of a spruce up a few weeks ago – that was the first stage of the current project.
As of today, all of Unmade’s content now lives within Mumbrella.
With Mumbrella’s readers all working within the media industry, I know I don’t need to apologise for asking you to pay for our content, if it’s worth it. Our job is to make sure that’s the case.
With more yet to come, we’ve been steadily reinvesting. For the last couple of months, we’ve had extra staff working to ensure that the Mumbrella Pro directory is once more up to date.
You may have seen that at the start of the year, Hal Crawford, one of Australia’s most experienced and respected news executives joined us as editorial director. Last week, Eleanor Dickinson rejoined us as chief reporter. Eleanor is a previous editor of Mumbrella Asia, and before that reported for the Middle East edition of Campaign magazine.
We’re also beginning to build a stable of excellent, grown-up industry columnists. You’ll have already seen Mark Ritson’s first column. Shortly we’ll be announcing the rest of our new columnists.
Bringing Mumbrella and Unmade together will result in another practical benefit. Rather than sending Mumbrella’s daily email to 38,000 people and Unmade to 23,000, we’ll be sending to a de-duplicated database of more than 55,000. I believe that will be the biggest in the market.
Every morning, we’ll send a Mumbrella-branded news email featuring the latest developments of the day. And at the end of the day, we’ll be sending an analytical and long form led newsletter which will also include our daily Unmade Index coverage of Australia’s listed media and marketing companies.
On a Saturday morning, Best of the Week will go to everybody.
As of today, we’ve dropped the price of a Mumbrella Pro subscription to $650. In the coming weeks I look forward to persuading you that’s a bargain.
