Mamamia’s upfronts in Sydney yesterday afternoon posed a tempting package for the industry.
The women-focused publisher unveiled a suite of new content offerings for a range of audience niches, touted impressive engagement figures in a tough market and a handful of new partnerships and offerings to round out its offering for advertisers.
Here, we’ll have all the announcements as well as what Nat Harvey, Mamamia’s CEO and Michael De Silva, its head of trading and commercial operations, thought about it all.
See what media buyers and the industry’s top marketers had to say here!
The market certainly seemed convinced—and you’ll shortly be able to read our full Mamamia upfront reaction piece, featuring Initiative’s CEO Jo McAlister and a handful of the country’s most senior marketers.
“There’s not a lot of positivity going around. It’s not the most fun market to be in. But we’re doing really well at the moment,” Harvey told B&T ahead of the presentation.
“We’re seeing double-digit revenue growth in a market that was back double digits in July… I don’t want to sound arrogant about that… But it was a very strategic play last year to launch new content that brought in different advertiser categories like health, finance, and that resonated really well with audiences.”
For 2026, Harvey and the team certainly seem to be doubling down on that approach.
Mamamia Content Slate
Here are the top lines of Mamia’s content slate.
The Spill podcast, which has seen a 16 per cent increase in downloads over the last three months, will be doubling weekly content output across multiple platforms including:
The Spill Morning Tea hosted by Ash London delivering the latest in celebrity news every weekday morning. The Spill: Reality Recaps and The Spill: Watch Party are part of Mamamia’s new ‘house of brands’ strategy and will be the new home of the latest reviews, recaps and deep dives into the movies and TV series everyone’s talking about.
New for 2026 are podcasts This is Why We Fight and Parenting Out Loud. This Is Why We Fight, hosted by the highly qualified and experienced Clinical Psychotherapist, Sarah Bays. This Is Why We Fight is Australia’s first and only therapy-based podcast that unpacks the core relationships in women’s lives today. Mamamia producers worked in close collaboration with Bays to design a framework that offers our
audience the unique opportunity to listen to authentic therapy sessions from across the country. It’s coming next month.
Parenting Out Loud is a spin-off from Mamamia’s original Mamamia Out Loud podcast. Monique Bowley, an original host of Mamamia Out Loud, is returning as producer/host of Parenting Out Loud alongside fellow journalists Amelia Lester and Stacey Hicks. Driven by the zeitgeist, just like Mamamia Out Loud, Parenting Out Loud will deliver what parents are actually talking about. It’s out now.
But it was the forthcoming Unleashed podcast that got attendees talking the most.
Women over 40 are “cashed up, unleashed from responsibilities and ready to be the main character,” said Mamamia, an audience that Unleashed will speak directly to.
The publisher added it was the first to market to recognise this back in 2021 with the launch of the Very Peri brand—and now, it’s expanding that vision with a brand-new content ecosystem spanning podcasts, newsletters, social, audience events, and more. Unleashed by Mamamia is in pre-production, with casting soon to be announced.
Retreat and Eats by Mamamia, meanwhile, are new video-first content ecosystems, expanded across app, site, socials and newsletters. Retreat will focus on travel content, Eats by Mamamia will, obviously, focus on food. Both promise to offer content based on women’s needs, rather than over-the-top, unrealistic content that often dominates the sectors.
Well by Mamamia, the health-focused multi-platform content ecosystem is also returning.
For Harvey, this plethora of offerings creates important moments for advertisers but reflects how Australian women consume content. It is not a straightforward, linear (not in the TV sense) experience. It’s all things, all the time, everywhere and a mix of what may have previously been considered high- and low-brow.
“The latest digital news report showed that Australian women are the biggest news avoiders in the world. They turn to us to get up-to-date information on what’s happening without it being too heavy. We do news content, we do some entertainment content, some beauty, some fashion. We make sure we’ve got content for whatever or wherever her mood is at that time, because women are not one-dimensional, right?” she said.
“At one time, they might be interested in whether they should wear skinny jeans again, or what was going on in the Mushroom Killer case today. Women bounce around a lot. The market is very tough, people are very stressed about cost-out and pressure from platforms. But we’re doing pretty well.”
For what it’s worth, Harvey believes skinny jeans never went out of fashion.
“At Mamamia, we are hyper-fixated on our audience. Looking at our rich data of audience behaviours and segmentation there is no denying our marquee brands are growing in relevance—and we are all about giving women more of what they want, we are in her head—literally, figuratively and culturally—and publish to our sweet spot: where audience need meets the zeitgeist,” said Zara Curtis, Mamamia’s chief content officer.
“This is fuelling our growth on all the platforms we publish and deepening our engagement with the most influential audience today—Australian women.”
House of brands
These new content offerings have also made Mamamia reflect on the way it considers its sub-brands. Now, it’s moving from a ‘branded house’ to a ‘house of brands’ approach.
“Everything’s been led as Mamamia [previously]. Yes, the website will still be called Mamamia but what we’re seeing is brands like The Spill and You Beauty that started out as podcast shows are now building their own ecosystems with social, newsletters and written articles on the site that are branded by heroing the entry point,” said Harvey.
“If someone wants to come for beauty content, they don’t want to go to Mamamia as such. That’s where the house of brands concept comes in.”
Harvey pointed to entertainment podcast The Spill as a perfect example with a new episode five days per week, an extra Friday ‘Weekend Watch’ epsiode, a new morning podcast called Morning Tea and Watch Party, designed to replicate watercooler conversations about TV, movies and more in the office. All are under The Spill’s umbrella.
“Each of these has their own socials, they’ll have pods and vods and, most likely, some newsletters. So you have one brand that has expanded into these sub-brands. There’s a really big future for beauty, entertainment, fashion, even Out Loud,” she added.
To help support all this content, Harvey said that Mamamia has invested in AI tools to assist in the repackaging of content for different channels.
“We’ve probably put on 10 in headcount in the last 12 months and we are looking at putting on more resource in the future as we continue to grow. But part of that may be agentic workforce, so the creative people can be freed up to focus on creative tasks,” said Harvey.
“The business of content is still very administration heavy and with a very heavy load on creative people, which takes them away from creating new content or moving at the pace we need everyone to. We’re currently looking at a couple of agentic employees to launch in the next few months and then [we] have a goal to scale that to realise some opportunities that we don’t currently have because the resource or the skill doesn’t exist. If we can get agentic employees to fill a gap from a resource perspective, then that enables us to keep scaling.”
Audience results
That hyper-fixation has led to some impressive numbers. Mamamia said it reaches 7.5 million Australian women every month (plus 2 million men). It also noted on numerous occasions at its upfronts that one woman has the equivalent spending power of four men.
The total number of downloads across its network were up 3.5 million in the financial year just ended and its Australian podcast listeners were up 5 per cent year-on-year, with its highest motnh ever in May.
Organic social impressions grew by 1.8 billion, while organic social interactions were up 81 per cent year-on-year. Newsletter open rates, Mamamia added, were three times over industry benchmarks.
Website and app page visits were also up 8 per cent year-on-year, no mean feat when many consider Google’s AI overviews to be siphoning search traffic at alarming rates.
Vudoo & Fabulate Partnerships
The final two cabs off the rank at the upfront were new partnerships with influencer platform Fabulate and commerce platform Vudoo.
Mamamia said the partnership with Fabulate offers brands the opportunity to deepen their connection with women via Mamamia and enhance their campaigns through superior data-driven insights and “best-in-market” technology from Fabulate.
“We identified that we needed a strong tech platform to support our strategic thinking,” said Harvey on the Fabulate partnership.
“We’ve got incredible strategists in the team who understand Australian women but identifying and reaching out to creators and implementing reporting takes a huge amount of time. We think it’s a really nice combination of our strategic thinking and their technical capabilities coming together.
“Our talent do a lot of social extensions off the backs of campaigns they run on platforms but we see enormous value in bringing in other creators who complement the campaigns we’re running.”
Speaking at the upfronts, De Silva said the, “real value lies in amplifying your Mamamia influencer campaigns through data, talent and tools… You can work with us using Mamamia talent or access the 1.2 million influencers that Fabulate brings to the table”.
Vudoo, meanwhile, is a slightly different beast. Together, the pair are bringing shoppable advertising video products to the market.
Advertisers will be able to get shoppable video across vodcasts, vertical video, and fully shoppable in-platform overlays through Mamamia’s commerce suite. It said this feature was was particularly powerful for fashion and beauty content.
In November, shoppable social vids are arriving with brands able to get direct purchase and add to cart functionality.
An additional opportunity for brands will be run-of-site in-stream and display shoppable ads on the Mamamia website and app, enabling direct in-stream purchases or driving traffic to a retailer’s website.
From January, Mamamia said more programmatic marketplace opportunities will become available. This marketplace will include shoppable ads that can be bought programmatically using purchase and intent-based audience segments.
“Since I joined six months ago, I’ve been struck by the depth of the relationship that Mamamia has with its audience,” said De Silva.
During its upfronts Mamamia regularly rolled out stats showing 74 per cent of its audience trusts the product recommendations made by its writers, podcast hosts and influencers and two-thirds of its audience claim they have purchased a product or service having heard about it through Mamamia’s advertising.
“It makes a lot of sense giving them the option to complete a purchase if they want to when they’re hearing about it… With Vudoo, from a tech perspective, you can purchase in-stream without ever having to leave the content, which is really powerful,” said De Silva.
“You’ve seen it a lot outside of Australia with social and live commerce but it’s something I don’t think you’ve seen done well here yet. Mamamia is uniquely positioned to work with our level of audience trust.”
