Shameless Media: The side hustle that became a podcast empire

Shameless Media's Michelle Andrews and Zara McDonald. Image: Instagram

When Zara McDonald and Michelle Andrews talk, millions of Gen Zs listen.

Six years after these 30-year-old Melbourne-based journos started local pop culture audio network Shameless Media on a bedroom floor, today it’s a fully fledged media company boasting fifteen staff.

Initially just side hustle aimed at filling a gap in celebrity news and reality TV podcasts, now it’s Australia’s biggest media brand for young women.

And it’s set to crack $10 million in revenue for FY25, according to its co-founders, a figure understood by Commercial Radio and Audio (CRA) to represent around 10 per cent of the overall local podcast market.

Remarkably, all of this has been achieved without any external investment.

As McDonald told the Australian Financial Review in 2024“People have wanted to invest. But we’ve never needed it. And we haven’t wanted it. We’ve been doing our own thing for so long, and we are the shareholders. We genuinely love that.”

McDonald and Andrews started their media careers at Mamamia. Not only have their podcasts achieved a whopping 100 million downloads, Shameless Media has 1.3 million social followers across its channels, as well as 110,000 newsletter subscribers.

Their Shameless podcast consistently makes the top 10 in the Triton Digital Australian Podcast Ranker.

Released every Thursday, it’s unapologetically described as ‘the pop culture podcast for smart people who love dumb stuff.’

As radio veteran Brad March told AFR, the secret to the duo’s success is simple: Content.

“It sounds dreary, but there is so much content out there that if you hit on something you don’t like, you’ll find something else pretty quickly. Their secret sauce is their chemistry and content.”

While Future Women founder Helen McCabe describes Shameless Media “uniquely successful”.

“I am extremely impressed by them,” she says. “They have that old school, young magazine editor chutzpah thing. It’s a bit smart, it’s a bit cool, it’s super-informed. They don’t dumb down their content or speak down to their audience.”