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.

So that's how you end up in Dubai, but how did you end up in Australia? Was the parent company based in Australia? 

So the Dubai experience was short. It was less than two years and that was plenty. I got back to the UK and then just happened to have a call from somebody who was publisher of B&T Magazine – which is back in the day used to stand for broadcast and television, but by then was a sort of general interest trade title – who on the grapevine had heard that I was available, and given that most of my stuff was on a boat on the way back from Dubai somewhere it wasn't that hard to to say yes to the Australian experience. So, yes, never having set foot in Australia before, I accepted the job and headed across to Australia rather than starting back in the UK trade press as I'd expected. And what year was that? So that was 2006, October 2006. 

At the time, there was a real boom of people coming in from not just the UK, but the US as well into Australia,particularly in specialist agency roles, because it was just sort of prior to the rise of programmatic advertising where suddenly the job was requiring a whole different level of experience.

So 2006 is when you moved to Australia. 2008 is when you launched Mumbrella. I think you had business partners in that. So what was the idea? What was the catalyst? What was the original thing that you were thinking about building?

So when I first came to Australia, the person who hired me as publisher was a chap called Martin Lane. After I accepted the job and put all my life in a suitcase about two or three weeks before I started, he emailed me to say, by the way, we won't be working together because I'm leaving. So Martin went off to work as general manager of a publication called TNT, which was a printed newsletter for backpackers that was distributed in Aussie pubs. And alongside Martin, his colleague in that was a chap called Ian Wakeling. and they had ambitions to launch a B2B arm. So they launched a small title called Backpacker Trade News. But Martin, after having dragged me across to Australia, stayed in touch and kept nagging me to come and join them and launch something myself with them. So after two years at B&T, which was broadly a print-based product with a slight footprint in digital, I think I began to read the runes that there wasn't as much appetite within my current employer to do the digital things I wanted to do. So in the end, I made the leap with the decision to go across and launch what became Mumbrella as a rival to the two main existing print titles in the space. 

So the two people who were running this backpack publication, they became partners of yours when you launched Mumbrella?

Yeah, correct. So I ended up working out of TNT's office. And of course, this was a print product and like all print products kind of declining. But that was actually a beautiful kind of incubator model because I was in an existing newsroom with existing facilities. You know, you need a bit of design work there's someone there. You need some help in organizing an event or something, there's someone there, and gradually many members of that team as we grew at Mumbrella began to then come across onto the existing team until by the end we were occupying most of that space.

So with Mumbrella the original idea was a PDF newsletter?

That's right. The original dreadful idea was a PDF newsletter. So there is a tiny bit more logic to that than it sounds. So something I had noticed when I was at B&T was our daily newsletter, which went alongside our weekly print product, was PDF based. Now, I thought that was a terrible idea at the time. But the one thing that we did notice was there were advertisers then who were really happy to buy a full page ad in the PDF who wouldn't necessarily have wanted to buy an online display ad. So there was a sort of logic to it.

So the thinking of what my Mumbrella would become would be a series of really specialist PDF newsletters. So in my thinking, there will be a weekly title for just people working in media agencies, a weekly PDF for just people working in advertising agencies, maybe one for people working in the media owner side, et cetera. So the thinking was that there will be this network of PDFs, and then almost the afterthought was there will be some sort of receptacle where we would put all of this content together under one overarching brand, and that receptacle was Mumbrella. Unfortunately, pragmatic trumped strategic, And when we launched in late 2008, Christmas was coming soon, and there didn't seem much point in starting the advertising conversations and launching these publications that side of Christmas. So we started with Mumbrella as a blog on WordPress. And we just picked our moment really well. Not through expertise, but through luck. It was just three things. WordPress became stable. Email became cheap. And social media came through and Twitter became this great amplifier of the conversation. So just this cheeky little blog really took up and began to very quickly find a place in the conversation around media and marketing.

What did it cover exactly? Was it just Australia media and marketing, or were you doing global media and marketing? What were you writing about?

Yeah the central focus was always people working in the communications industry in Australia. They were the audience and of course what you were looking for was anything that was relevant to them. So an awful lot of that will be things happening in the market. But also, obviously, you'd want to cover a global story when it was relevant to them. And you'd want to see that through the Australian lens. We were covering everything under the media and marketing umbrella, and that was also obviously where the brand Mumbrella came from, the M's of media and marketing along with the word umbrella.

Was it just you writing it for it or did you have a reporting team?

Initially it was just me just doing some crazy hours. I would say for probably at least the first year it was just me, but I suppose where I'd benefited from over the years working on daily papers, I got quite used to writing fast, and I guess by then I had enough domain expertise that I was able to know both my subject matter, but also what the point of interest or contention was. So I was probably posting at least seven or eight pieces a day, some of which, though, could only be two or three paragraphs and other much longer pieces. So you'd sort of create this package. And initially, the layout was the classic WordPress template.. And then as we began to find a bit of momentum, we did our first redesign, which at least created kind of a news stream, a feature stream, and a more kind of diary-based stream. But right from the beginning, the kind of secret sauce of it was the comment thread. There was just this really strong, opinionated, sometimes trouble-causing comment thread from the audience that it just all kind of came together at that moment.

And how long did it take you to build momentum?

Yeah, look, in terms of editorial momentum, it came along very, very quickly. If not weeks, then certainly months, it felt like it was a conversation. I remember chatting to the CEO of a media agency and he kind of said, when I walk around in the office, I can just see it's open on everyone's screens. And so much of that actually was the comments underneath the story. Because one of the things about the Australian marketing industry, and particularly the agency side of things, is they're just really horrible people to each other. They're really outspoken which does make for an intriguing comment thread. One of the first kind of transitional moments for us was having to switch to pre from post moderation, just because the defamation risk was getting so high as we began to find the audience. One of the things that I think got us so much momentum was the two established trade titles were both broadly still in print. They both still did weekly editions in print and their daily editions were so edition based. If one or the other of those titles had a really good story, they would just sit on it and not send their day's newsletter until the other one had sent. And they get involved in these standoffs where they both go later and later if they both had the same good story. And sometimes it'd be four or five o'clock in the afternoon. So we just came through in the middle and we sent our newsletter at lunchtime each day. And it was a good year before either of them reacted to that and started sending it at about the same time. So there was just this gap open for a while that we were lucky enough to jump into.

Yeah, I've interviewed a lot of Australian media entrepreneurs, and it seems like there was a lag between where the U.S. was and where Australia was. And you could sort of see trends starting in the U.S., and if you knew to jump on those trends, you could be ahead of the curve. I interviewed the founder of Mammamia. Her name's Mia Freedman. She was working for traditional women's magazines, but they were very print centric. And then she started Mamamia, and because all the women's magazines  still had a print mentality, she was able to just kind of run circles around them, and she scaled up an audience almost immediately. Whereas in the U.S., a lot of the women's publications had already moved towards publishing more digital content.

And with Mumbrella, the gossipy comment section stuff reminds me of the early days of Gawker because Gawker was originally like a Manhattan media gossip blog before it grew its purview and started covering more general news. But that was what it was originally like, that kind of snarky comment section.

So you started building momentum right away. And it was always a free publication? It was advertising supported?

Yeah, correct. Now I suppose one of the wonderful things about being in this media and marketing niche, there are advertisers who will pay a premium to talk to that audience because broadly they want to talk to marketers, because marketers hold budgets. So that whole trade press advertising side of things broadly revolves around that single point. So for us with Mumbrella back then, it made so much sense to maximize your audience in order to deliver that to the advertisers..

And the model did gradually grow as we went along. But yeah, if you had an audience, it was a wonderful niche to be in.

So you were selling display ads to tech companies that service marketing firms or something like that? ...

Some of that, but the primary one was media owners themselves, so media companies. In Australia, some of the dominant brands would be News Corp, for instance. So it would be News Corp. with a message on your website saying to marketers, you should consider us as your advertising option. It was a version of that. But obviously, as the tech companies came through as well, then yes, you absolutely did get your Googles or your Facebooks, et cetera, as advertisers too. But in many, many markets, including the US and UK, there are media owners who want to promote their wares to media agencies and marketers and use the trade media to do that.

Interesting. I've never never seen that. You think of media companies not having a lot of money that they would spend just to try to lure advertisers and marketers. So it's interesting.

I suppose one of the ways of thinking about it is if you're a TV network – in Australia, there are three dominant TV networks at seven, nine, and ten. And if they can shift 1% of their share across from another one, then that is many millions of dollars in difference. So of course they'll do things like the upfronts, but the other way is through having a kind of trade press strategy.

So you eventually got into events, right? And that eventually ended up being one of your more lucrative revenue models.

Yeah, that's right. So we started with small niche events, but I guess they were always about building the community in some way. So they started off literally with Mumbrella question time. You'd sell tickets for maybe a couple hundred dollars. It'd be breakfast at a venue. And then on stage, I'd moderate a conversation with four or five experts. So you probably have a marketer on stage, someone from a media agency, someone from an advertising agency, and maybe someone from a media company. And you just talk about the topics of the day.

You take some questions from the audience and it would wrap up in an hour, hour and a half. In addition to the revenue from tickets, you'd probably have a sponsor on board as well. So that was where we were beginning to monetize that.

And then we probably really went through two phases that really helped us round out the event side of things. One was in 2011, we launched an event called Mumbrella 360. And the idea was this would be a conference for anyone working in the communications industry. The thinking would be it would be big enough and broad enough that if you bought a ticket, there'll be something going on that would be relevant to you. So multiple stages across two and a half days.

And again, we managed to just sort of build some momentum. In the U S you already had events like Advertising Week that did something very similar and, But again, there was nothing quite like that in the market. We really leaned heavily into involving our own community in the kind of the curation of it. So we invited people to propose sessions. And we just had a huge response. You know, it was probably at least 100 proposals or something like that. And again, one of the things we did, we actually published all of the proposals and invited people to vote on which ones they wanted to hear.

That's what South by Southwest does now.

Yes, exactly. And very possibly they did it even then as well. And the thing was, it was so clumsily presented on our part that I suspect there were very few readers who actually did wade their way through the probably 200,000 words worth of proposals.

But it was a really great proof point that the audience was getting behind it. And then, of course, people go where the market is. So sponsors began to come on board because they could see it had momentum. And then people sort of became intrigued. We always had a kind of policy of being really generous with sponsors, so it just meant that by the time we came to run the event it had numbers and was going to become self-fulfilling. So we only launched it in January, 2011. We put our first call out and we ran it in June, 2011, which is just insane. You know, if I'd known then what I know now, I never would have done it. Because of course this was an incredibly small team still at this point, because we were still only about three years old. We were a really small team. I was still trying to publish multiple pieces every day whilst also directly curating this whole conference as well. But it was all about getting to the first year as a success and then building from there, which is what we did.

So we took over two floors of the Hilton. We had, I imagine, maybe 2,000 people through the doors for the first one. And very organically, it worked. The buzz and the quality the speakers were enough that we had even more demand for people to come along next time around.

So that became an annual conference that you did

Yeah, so Mumbrella 360 became our big annual generalist conference. And then as we grew as a business, there was myself and Martin Lane active in the day-to-day, and then Ian Wakeling as a third partner was more of an investor. He wasn't involved in the day-to-day. But we kind of realized that we were both journos by background who'd sort of accidentally ended up running this media business. So we got some help from a chap who began to come in and advise us two half days per week. And his mantra was repeatable processes, but building some structure behind things. So he would work with our sales team for half a day a week, and then sort of with Martin and I on the running of the business on the other half day.

And we began to figure out actually if we could create events which follow the same template, but served different niches, then we would just be able to execute so much more. So we began to do marketing summits in specific niches. So the travel marketing summit was our first one. Then you do the financial marketing summit, the automotive marketing summit, And by the end, we had five or six sort of niche summits, of which it was a really beautiful model because there was a very definable group of people who would want to come along and buy tickets.

And there was a very definable group of potential sponsors who, if there's going to be one event they sponsored that year to speak to that audience, that will be the one. So that sort of really began to round out the conference side of the business for us, I suppose.

Yeah, it's interesting. I always think of Australia as having such a smaller population than the US. It's like, what, 30 million people?

Yeah, that would be about right. Yeah. So we're small. You know, it's like it's always said about Australia. You can support about two and a half things of most things. So two and a half supermarket chains, two and a half airlines. So, yes, your observation is absolutely right. I think the way we made that work in Australia is if you look at somewhere like the US or even the UK, you have a specialist title for people working in advertising agencies, a specialist title for people working in PR and so on. Whereas Mumbrella, because we kind of conglomerated it all together under one umbrella, that made our addressable market just small enough that we could still manage to talk to it as one market, but also just big enough it became a market that we could actually have a trading relationship that worked..

Yeah, I guess I'm surprised there was a large enough of – for instance, travel marketing industry that they could support its own conference or something. You know what I 

Yes, and you're probably talking about 200 people in the room on the day, but that's enough to work on that scale. 

So at its peak, I think you told me that it was generating like $7 million a year. Was that split between events and then just advertising on the website?

Yeah, it was. I mean, the main sources of revenue were events. And of course, the beauty of those is that they can involve both tickets and sponsorship. Now, separate to that sponsorship, you then have on the publishing side of things, you have advertising. Now, often it's the very same people who might be sponsoring an event are also the potential advertisers. But sometimes they've just got a bit of a different sort of strategy for going slightly more broad. And that would be advertising both on the daily email newsletter, but also on the website itself through some sort of classic CPM model. Although we never did programmatic. With programmatic, you might get one or two dollars CPM, whereas we would confidently ask for 50 or 70 dollars CPM because of the quality of the audience that we were delivering. And then the other part was smaller, but there was a paid information tier where we created a directory of which brands worked with which agencies, so say you worked in media sales and you wanted to pitch a particular campaign to a particular telco, you'd want to see which media agency you should be talking to. So that became a subscription product. 

When did you decide to sell the company?

Yeah, it was something of an organic conversation. So as I say, there was Martin and myself involved in the day to day. Then Ian Wakeling as the third partner had been a very patient man in that he'd not been taking a salary or dividends from the company. So we began to look for an exit for him, which I suppose it was probably about 2016, late 2016, that process would have started. So we engaged somebody to run that process for us, to create a full detailed information memorandum. We were kind of agnostic about what that would mean for Martin and I. We were open to retaining ownership ourselves whilst finding an exit for Ian, but in the end the the proposals that came in sort of were much more structured around a route to us all making a full ownership exit. 

So who did you end up selling it to?

So we ended up selling to a US-based company, Diversified, who are broadly now in the expo space. So they're based in Maine. And they're also, amongst other places, in the UK and Australia, around the world, mainly in expos. But I think they had an interest in adding other strings to the bow. They became the acquirer in late 2017.

So they're a live events company. So even though they were probably interested in the media arm, they probably first became interested because of your events.

I think that's true. Although the funny thing about Mumbrella was we always talked about doing an expo, but we never did. So that was the one thing we didn't offer as part of it. But yeah, definitely one of the attractions in that part of the world t would have been the events side of things.

And when did that sale happen?

So that happened in December 2017 with a sort of two-year lock-in for myself and Martin.

Two year lock-in to work there or two year non-compete?

Two year lock-in to work there, four year non-compete.

Four year non-compete. So when did your non-compete run up?

So our non-compete ran out in very late 2021.

So you went on and you launched another brand called Unmade. And it's in the same vertical, right? Like it's covering media and stuff like that. Is it still kind of Australian media?

Yeah, broadly. So the way that came about was I had some family reasons why I expected to be committed to being in the UK for a number of years, which was something I shared with our new owners. So we were hopeful I might be in a position to stay on board and do something for the UK.

But 2020 came along and the appetite to do something new in the UK didn't happen. So Unmade was my way of staying in touch with the Australian industry for when I came back. So in part of 2020, I'd taken a long service leave in which I'd written a book, which was called Media Unmade. And it was about the sort of history of Australia's media from 2010 to about 2020, sort of telling the story of how it got to where we were at that point.

So my thinking was by the time I came back to Australia in maybe 2025 or something, I'd want to find ways of staying in touch. So Unmade became sort of a London-based publication for an Australian audience where I thought, OK, I'll try and lean into being in the other hemisphere, being in the other time zone, covering the interesting global things that have happened overnight for an Australian audience. But then it so happened that my personal circumstances changed again. So I ended up coming back to Australia sooner than expected, which has probably, in all honesty, kind of accelerated the business side of the publication faster than I would have expected.

So you launched Unmade prior to you moving back to Australia? 

Correct, yes. 

And I was surprised to see it was a Substack newsletter because given that you were an experienced media entrepreneur that built up a multi-million dollar media company. Usually someone with that kind of background will go with a custom website. Why’d you decide on Substack?

Yeah, so I decided to do Substack. I was super interested anyway. It was just at that moment where people were beginning to talk about it. And Substack also made it financially worth my while to do that. So I was very fortunate that I knew a little bit through having previously interviewed Hamish McKenzie, one of the co-founders of Substack. So at the time, Substack was funding a few journalists, mostly in the US.

Yeah, this was Substack Pro.

Yeah, correct. So just as I think the boom gates were coming down on Substack Pro, I just managed to sneak in before the boom gates closed. And they have effectively funded our first year. If you're going to do that, then you have to be cool with not carrying ads on your Substack during that time because they predominantly see the world as a subscription world. Whereas I just happen to be in a niche where there are more advertising dollars than most. But I was very comfortable to do that deal because, of course, what you actually want to do is to build up an audience before you monetize your advertising. So it was great. So effectively having Substack back us for that first year where we were finding our feet and finding an audience really did make it a lot easier to go it alone. It never felt like a compromise for doing Substack. 

And I think the other thing as well is that there is something slightly different about email first. It feels a bit more like you are writing a letter to your reader in some way. And the time will come fairly soon, I think, where we're not email first. But having a point of difference for what's a very crowded local market of offering email first was another reason for doing it.

And so you've now launched a media company in 2008 and then the early 2020s. Obviously, there are a lot of differences in the sense that you had already-existing contacts. You probably had an already-existing personal brand. So you had a little bit of a leg up there. But what does it feel like is the biggest difference in terms of those two media ecosystems that you launched into?

Honestly, and I love listening to your podcast, but the thing I always most enjoy is where the people admit to the stuff they find hard. And for me, I would say that this time around, I've been flapping my wings twice as hard and it's gone half as fast. So we are moving forward, but I don't think I appreciated last time around how much those winds were behind us. 

And that kind of goes back to what I was talking about with the Mamamia thing, where you were publishing into an information vacuum back then where you literally had no competition. But now you're launching into an ultra-saturated media market of not just newsletters, websites, TikTokers, Instagram accounts, YouTubers. You are just competing with not just content with your niche, but just people's time for content in general. It is just a completely different attention span that you're dealing with now.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So you have to find a different niche. Whereas last time round,, the thing about Mumbrella was it was trying to be everything for everybody. Whereas this time, I guess my greatest asset now is being one of the more experienced journalists in the market. I've been covering the Australian market for, gosh, nearly 18 years, but writing about media and marketing for more than 20. So that places me better than most to actually be able to give the context side of things to the audience. So my niche now is much more about one or two pieces a day, which are more detailed, much more about that third paragraph explaining why, rather than publishing every single press release that comes through. So our differentiator in a kind of crowded trade press is you may find five of them carrying exactly the same story, but we will hopefully be the only place where you'll read something original and different. So that is broadly where we're beginning to – it'll be our three-year anniversary in August, so depending when this goes up we might not be quite there or we might be there, so we're still only finding our feet at the moment, but where we're developing a niche is around a reputation for analysis that you can't read  elsewhere on the day. 

So, for that contract you signed with Substack, I know of other writers that signed it. It basically says you can't have any advertising in the newsletter for the year, and then once that year is up, it reverts back to you, and it goes back to the 90-10 split for the subscriptions, and then you can basically do whatever you want with your newsletter. So now that that has expired, what's kind of your business model mix now?

Yeah, so you're right, that expired. And you've got that exactly right. It was one year and we'll always be grateful to Substack for giving us that start. So stage one of the process was we de-risked it slightly when we launched advertising by outsourcing it to a media sales house. So that model where you pay them a monthly retainer, and then a probably slightly higher percentage commission than you would pay to a member of staff. So that has got us through the next two years of that process. And we've appointed our first person to lead sales in-house. So this person will have the title of partnership director. And that is a sort of sign of the fact that we've grown over those two years of outsourced sales. And it's time to see how far we can go by bringing it in house.

And is it the same kind of sponsors you had from Mumbrella or is there a different mix now?

Yeah, look, the Australian financial year ends in June. So I've got a reasonably good set of data at the moment. So breaking down our revenues for the last financial year, which ended about a month ago. So paid subs, 18%. Advertising on the newsletter, 47%. Sponsorship of our events, 17%. And event tickets, 20%. So in other words, the publishing arm is about two thirds at the moment and the event arm is about one third, give or take.

Who are the sponsors? Is it the same folks that were sponsoring you back in 2008? 

Very broadly, yes.

How big is your staff?

So staff is still pretty small. So we have a chief of staff and that's not the journalistic tradition of chief of staff. This is the person who sort of leads our operational side of things. So she, at the moment, works half-time.

We have a person who leads the curation side of our events. So, you know, putting together the programmes, which I view very much as a journalistic role. And she also has been halftime and she's about to step up to full time. We just hired the head of partnerships. And then we're currently carrying a vacancy for a second journalist in addition to myself, which we'll fill at some point in the coming months. But it sort of means that most of my day, certainly my working hours, is still involved in writing.

And I see you have a fancy mic there. Are you doing podcasting or any other kind of multimedia type stuff?

Yeah, we do two podcasts a week. So at 8 am on a Monday, we record one called Start the Week, which is literally attempting to be an agenda starter for the week. And it's a conversation about key topics that have maybe broken in that day's newspapers, because they tend to all have their media and marketing sections on a Monday. So sort of reacting to that, looking in the diary, and that's co-presented by myself and Abe Udy, who owns an audio editing company called Abe's Audio. And they're based here in Australia.

And then on a Thursday, our other podcast is more interview based. So it will generally be a conversation with somebody who's in some way a player in this media and marketing world.

And so what is your ambition? Are you just running the playbook for Mumbrella again, just kind of build it up to, you know, X million in revenue and then sell it again? What do you want to be doing in five years?

Look, I think the thing that always left me a bit conflicted about Mumbrella was selling before I could quite see how far we could go. And I suppose there's also the challenge that this time around – I feel terribly fraudulent, but somewhere on my LinkedIn profile, the word says CEO and publisher, and it always feels really fraudulent to have the word CEO against a business that employs just four or five people. But last time around, you know, I contributed to strategy and wore a hat as a company director and as a shareholder, but my colleague Martin was the CEO. So I'd like to find out for myself if I can actually run a media business myself as well. But the big conflict with that one is that – the thing I actually love doing still is the writing. So I think I'm an adequate publisher and my real domain expertise is in writing about this particular industry. It's about getting to enough scale, I think, where I can hand over to the experts to do the things that experts will be better than me at. And we're still super early in that process because our revenue is in the very low hundreds of thousands of dollars at the moment. It's certainly not in the millions yet.