How Tim Burrowes helped build Mumbrella into a $7 million media brand
Its gossipy comments section quickly attracted an audience of bored office workers.
In 2008, Tim Burrowes launched a scrappy WordPress blog covering Australia’s media and marketing industry. Within a few years, that blog had transformed into Mumbrella — a multi-million-dollar media business generating the majority of its revenue from events.
At its peak, Mumbrella was pulling in around $7 million annually, built on a mix of advertising, conferences, and niche industry summits. But what makes Burrowes’ story particularly compelling isn’t just how quickly he built it — it’s how much of that success came down to timing, structural advantages, and a willingness to experiment in a market that hadn’t yet caught up to digital publishing.
Nearly two decades into covering the media business, Burrowes is now attempting to replicate that success with a second venture, Unmade. But this time, he’s doing it in a radically different landscape — one where the “winds” that propelled Mumbrella no longer exist.
“I don’t think I appreciated last time how much those winds were behind us,” he says. “This time around, I’ve been flapping my wings twice as hard and it’s gone half as fast.”
This is the story of how Mumbrella was built — and what its founder has learned from trying to do it again.
From Local Newspapers to Trade Media
Burrowes’ career began in a very different media era. He entered journalism in 1989, just in time to be trained on a manual typewriter.
“I remember the excitement when the fax machine got installed in the office,” he recalls.
Like many journalists of his generation, he started in local newspapers, covering council meetings, emergency services, and community news. Over time, he transitioned into specialist trade media, eventually becoming editor of Media Week in the UK — a publication covering the business side of media and advertising.