How Tim Burrowes helped build Mumbrella into a $7 million media brand

Its gossipy comments section quickly attracted an audience of bored office workers.

Like a lot of journalists in the mid-2000s, Tim Burrowes grew frustrated with his employer’s print mentality and its tendency to treat online publishing as an afterthought. At the time, he worked for an Australian trade magazine that covered that country’s media industry.

So in 2008, he and two co-founders decided to launch Mumbrella, a competing blog that published upwards of 15 times a day. Its gossipy comments section quickly attracted an audience of bored office workers, and within a few years it was hosting multiple industry events that collectively generated millions of dollars.

In a recent interview, Tim explained how Mumbrella made such a big splash so quickly, why he and his co-founders decided to sell it, and what he’s doing differently with his newest media startup.

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Transcript

Hey, Tim. Thanks for joining us.

Hey, an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for the invitation. Long-time listener, first-time caller.

That's great. Well, we're here to talk about two media brands that you have launched and run yourself. Before you launched your first company, which is called Mumbrella, what was your background in journalism?

Like increasingly few people, I came up through newspapers. So first in the UK – the first seven or eight years working on various regional and local newspapers of just about every frequency from weekly through to multi-edition daily. And then gradually I diverted into more specialist media.

So you started with local beat reporting? .

Correct. Yeah. So absolutely classic local newspapers where you would be covering the local council meeting. You'd be going to visit the ambulance station every day, talk to the fire fighters, all of that sort of thing, And then I sort of gradually moved to busier, regional newspapers that were broadly kind of local. I used to think of that as the first third of my career, but being realistic, it's probably the first 15% or 20% now. 

But then I moved more into specialist media. So I did a number of years on a title writing about  hospital doctors in the UK. I guess I honed my editing skills there. And then I became editor of Media Week in the UK At that point, I was hired for my editing skills rather than my industry knowledge, which then developed along the way.

So you were in traditional newspapers in the 90s, right? So it was mainly print reporting. Is that correct?

Yeah, 1989. I came in just in time to be trained on a manual typewriter. You know, I remember the excitement when the fax machine got installed in the office. So I've been through a couple of technology cycles of things that came along and faded as well.

And then you got into B2B specialist media in the early 2000s? 

Yeah, so my first B2B specialist job was a title for hospital doctors, which was 1996, if I recall correctly. So yeah, so that was my sort of entree. And then I've been writing about and working in that media and marketing beat since 2002. So frighteningly enough, I guess if I do the maths, that's more than two decades now.

Yeah. So this was a B2B publication that was read by people who worked at early 2000s marketing agencies, like almost like an Ad Age or an AdWeek or something like that in the U.S.?

Yeah, that's right. So the center of gravity for Media Week in the UK was about the business side of media. So it would have been read predominantly by people in media agencies or people working in media sales on the media owner side of things.

So how did you end up moving to Australia? 

Yeah, so via the Middle East, I ended up as the launch editor of Campaign Middle East, which was a franchise from Haymarket's original Campaign title in the UK. 

And what was that? What did they cover?

Yeah, so that was read by anyone involved in the communications industry. So still media, but also marketing as well. People working in advertising agencies, people involved in the creation of content. And that was for the whole region.

Specifically people who worked for marketing agencies in the Middle East? 

Yeah, that's correct. Or people working in the creation of media, the creation of making advertising. So our center of gravity was Dubai. But you probably had three real hubs at that point. Saudi Arabia was the biggest consumer audience. So you had some people present there. But a lot of the actual advertising was created either out of Dubai or out of Lebanon as well, actually. At that point, Beirut was more so then a kind of creative hub than maybe it is now. But it meant you got to do some really interesting visits across the whole region.

And was this an English language publication?

Yeah, correct. It was. So predominantly the business language was English, which was lucky because my Arabic was exceptionally poor. But I suppose where it was really useful for me as a journo was seeing a startup up close. And it's one thing to come along as an editor and see that there's an awards process already in place, and you do the call for entries and people pay to enter and all of those other things, and it just exists. But when you start one yourself and it works,then that sort of just gives you the kind of confidence later when you do it yourself, then there's something to it.

I guess I'm surprised that there's a large enough marketing industry in the Middle East that also speaks English. 

Yeah. And I suppose what you would often find is because so much of marketing relates to the global holding companies – so your WPPs, your Omnicoms, your publicists – they will own local offices, and generally the CEO of that office is an English speaking person. So then that becomes the language of the business, even if a lot of the advertising they're creating is Arabic language. So you definitely have sort of two tiers. So there were Arabic language specialist publications, trade press publications as well. But broadly, I think the business language of the marketing world globally, which I guess becomes personified when you see everyone turn up at the Cannes Lions in June, is English language.