An Unmade update – more subscribers, more listeners, more jetlag
Welcome to Unmade, written on what I would hesitantly describe as a springlike day in the UK, while you were sleeping on Wednesday morning.
Happy National Artichoke Hearts day.
Today’s writing soundtrack: Kate Bush – The Whole Story.
Today’s edition is for subscribers to Unmade’s paying tier. Everyone else will hit a paywall a little further down.
I promised when we launched Unmade last August that I would keep you up to date on our progress. It would be a wasted opportunity to run a publishing experiment in the media world and not share the journey.
It’s time for our first update of 2022. I’ll be sharing numbers on our progress with subscribers to our main email, and to the paid tier. I’ll also be offering some data on how our podcast is progressing.
Before we get to the paywall, I’ll also mention that we’ve just introduced a seven day free trial for those who want try before committing.
If you do choose to subscribe to Unmade, you’ll get more than the warm feelings of supporting independent journalism. You’ll also get access to subscriber-only analysis, subscriber-only podcast episodes and discounted access to future Unmade live events. We also have a further subscriber-only initiative which we will share soon.
So how are we travelling since our last update on November 29?
Overall, we’re going quite well. We’ve got twice the overall number of subscribers we had then, and about a third more paying readers. We’ve also doubled our staff. Now there are two of us.
Back then we had 2,725 in the overall database. Now the number is 5,959.
The chart looks spectacularly exponential when it goes as far back as the point in August 2020 when I began to experiment with Unmade’s predecessor on the Substack platform, Fifth Day. As you’ll see, it was only when I left Mumbrella and rebooted Fifth Day as Unmade that things began to get moving properly.
Charted over the last 90 days, you can see a less spectacular (but still satisfying) angle of expansion, with steady growth except for during the Christmas shutdown, and a bit of a jump when we shared the news of Damian Francis joining me as managing partner.
Meanwhile, paying subscriptions have been – as we expected – more of a slog since we switched them on at the end of September.
We currently have 232 paying subscribers, up from 154 in our last update. We appreciate every one of you.
In revenue terms, if every one of those 232 was paying the headline subscription fee of $650, we’d already be well on the way. Assuming no churn, that would amount to annual revenue of about $150,000.
However, as you may recall, we ran a couple of quite generous offers to sign up our first paying readers. So as we stand, the real gross annualised revenue number is US$29,175.
If it weren’t for the fact that Substack is helping to subsidise our first year through the Substack Pro program, I’d be nervous.
However, the long runway given to us by the Substack support means that we’ve been able to play a long game. We’re only slowly increasing the number of posts limited to paying subscribers.
One reason for that is that while journalists on the Substack Pro program are asked not to take advertising for the first year, we can see a time when that will be another revenue stream.
Philosophically, although I’m attracted to the long term certainty that subscribers offer, I don’t think that advertising is a dirty word either. If there’s a downside to mainstream media’s evolution from advertising to subscriptions, it’s been the tendency to incentivise polarised content when you’re publishing to keep a narrow interest group engaged.
Admittedly, it’s not quite the same situation in business publishing, where the central challenge is in delivering sufficient value to the audience so they decide it’s worth renewing their subscription.
My instinct is that at this stage growing our overall database is more of a priority. Not only is it a future funnel of paying subscribers, but it is also a universe we will be in a position to ask to attend future events, and to assist advertisers in communicating with. I’m told that our overall database may already be larger than at least one competitor.
And the paying subscriber mindset is also a good discipline. Shortly before Damian signed on the dotted line, we spent a couple of days at my place in Tasmania fleshing out our strategy. One of our key organising thoughts is that while not everything we do will be paid for, it should all be worth paying for.
The market has become quite crowded with the same press release sometimes appearing in similar form in four or five different outlets. These days, the trade press PRs, mostly former reporters themselves, outgun their former journalist colleagues in both number and experience.
Unmade’s point of difference is attempting to add value by offering context and analysis. My 20 years and Damian’s decade of covering this beat will help with that.
Soon you’ll begin to see Damian’s first efforts in content just for the paying subscribers.
We’re also figuring out the Unmade podcast as we go. Substack allows us to create seperate mailing lists, so in time we may not bombard everybody on the main list with an email each time there’s a new podcast. Do let us know what you think about that.
As you may have seen, we’re currently in the third week of our experiment with a podcast to start the week, recorded by Damian and myself early on a Monday morning and rapidly edited by Abe’s Audio in Tasmania.
That timing of Monday aims to capture not just developments over the weekend, but also recognises that The Australian, The AFR, The SMH and The Age all publish their media and marketing pages on that day of the week.
Our cumulative podcasts downloads are now at just under 6,000.
This week’s edition of the Start The Week podcast, in which we discussed the allegations of sexual abuse made by Ella Campbell over the weekend towards a former STW colleague, was our most downloaded to date, with 419 downloads in the first two days. In the scheme of things, that’s still a relatively niche number, but it also represents 188 listening hours which is real engagement. That’s 419 people from within our industry who’ve given us a serious amount of listening time.
But just over six months in, Unmade is still in its earliest of days. More and more I’m getting flashes of what it can be. Yet at the same time, behind the scenes we’re still setting up the business basics.
I did enough to get us up and publishing, but I’ve left Damian to do all the heavy lifting with the important administrative stuff like setting up our accounting software and administrative backbone. That work only started when he joined not much more than a month ago.
And, honestly, there have been headwinds.
As I’ve previously written, I have family reasons for spending more time in the UK over the next few years. That has its positives for Unmade – when news breaks out from Europe and the US, I can write about it ready for the Australian morning. And I’ll also be in the right place to meet and interview interesting executives.
But the jetlag when I fly between the two hemispheres means I’m not particularly sharp for the rest of the week after I travel. I’m also having to make tough choices on what conference calls are worth joining if it means getting up at 2am and wrecking sleep patterns. I suspect there’s a lot of machismo from execs who claim to take it in their stride. On an ongoing basis, it’s harder than you might think.
Plus, it’s still essential to be in Sydney and Melbourne on a regular basis. My meetings in Sydney the week before last gave me so many insights into what’s going on, that can only come over a coffee or beer. Hopefully, when I have a couple of days in Central London next week, I’ll get a similar benefit here too.
But those are, quite literally, first world problems.
As I’ve said before, everything you see on Unmade is still at the experimental stage. I’d love to hear what you think.
As a paying subscriber, your vote counts double…
Newsfeed
Havas buys media agency Frontier
Global holding company Havas Group has taken a majority stake in direct response media agency Frontier Australia. Frontier, founded by Neil Hoar, lists clients including Finder.com.au, Temple & Webster, Global Shop Direct and BlueBet. The acquisition comes 18 months after Havas Media acquired media agency Hyland from Virginia Hyland. Frontier will be folded in Havas Group’s Edge Performance Network.
HBO Max and Discovery Plus come together
Discovery’s merger with AT&T’s Warner Media will see the merger of the two companies’ streaming services Discovery Plus and HBO Max into a single global offering within “months”, Discovery said yesterday. The move will have major implications for Foxtel and its streaming service Binge which currently holds the Australian HBO rights, with the deal due to expire at the end of next year. HBO content – the likes of Succession, Game of Thrones, Euphoria and Curb Your Enthusiasm – is the backbone of Binge and the Fox Showcase channel.
#MeToo accuser refuses to back down
Ella Campbell, an ex-staffer of the WPP-aligned former STW Group agency Moon, has declined to remove a LinkedIn post accusing her former colleague Chris Laws of harassment. She published a follow-up post featuring an extract of her response to a request from Laws’ lawyer to remove the post. Laws denies the accusation. A GoFundMe campaign to assist Campbell with any future legal costs has so far raised nearly $6,000.
Unmade Index back in correction territory
The Unmade Index of ASX-listed media and marketing companies slipped back below 900 points on Tuesday – putting it in correction territory with a fall of more than 10% on the 1000 point index opening at the start of the year.
Southern Cross Austereo saw the biggest fall yesterday, of 2.7%. Both Ooh Media and Seven West Media are now well below their recent $1bn market capitalisations.
Marketing holding company Enero bucked the trend, with a rise of more than 4%.
Time to let you go about your day.
As ever, we welcome your thoughts.
Thanks once again for being a subscriber
Tim Burrowes
Unmade
