Mamamia focusing on four pillars in 2025: Work, birth, divorce, and health
Mamamia is expanding what it calls its ‘edu-tainment’ offering, with four new categories: work, birth, divorce, and women’s health.
Announced at the media company’s upfronts in Sydney on Tuesday afternoon, the four content tiers will feature new podcasts, online conferences, written and video content, and the same focus on heart, help and humour that is central to Mamamia’s appeal.
Maddy Lawler, Mia Freedman, Jessica Anderson, Nat Harvey, Danni Wright, Zara Curtis
WORK
Launching in February 2025, is Biz, a new brand that covers all aspects of what work means to women of all generations. The Biz ecosystem will include content across written, video, newsletters, social, and audio – as well as the Biz podcast, which will be helmed by Michelle Battersby, well-known former CMO turned entrepreneur.
“We’re seeing that Gen Z, they’re going to have, like, 16 different career changes in their lifetimes,” Eliza Sorman Nilsson, Mamamia’s head of content, tells Mumbrella of the shifting employment landscape
“I think a couple of years ago, it was all about the ‘girl boss’, but now it’s kind of, you want to be ambitious, but you also want to be home at 4pm some days. I think there’s different ways to work. And for us, it’s not just about the career ladder anymore. It’s about the career lattice.
Michelle Battersby
“Work is something that everyone has to do, and work is something that’s part of everyone’s life, regardless of where you are in your work journey. So I think what we found in the past with content around work, it’s very much been about the high achievers.”
Biz will focus on the vast majority of workers who aren’t simply striving for a CEO role.
“It’s how to be more productive at work, and it’s the life around work as well. How to deal with the narcissists at work, how to save your money. So it’s about everything around that work-life that we want to bring to this content.”
Sorman Nilsson says Biz will be “funny and humorous and not just that earnest,” and not lean on the tired, traditional business wisdom.
“It’s not about textbooks,” Mamamia CEO Nat Harvey confirms, telling Mumbrella, it’s not about “the seven principles of leadership”, as parroted in countless other business forums.
“That’s not what this is. This is really like everything we do from an editorial perspective, we put on a lens of heart, health or humor or all three. There’ll be a lot of health, there’ll be some humor, maybe a little bit of heart with this.”
“There’s a massive appetite for it when we do run any sort of finance or work content — it does perform really well on site — so the signals are there that it’s going to be an appetite for it.”
Eliza Sorman Nilsson
BIRTH
300,000 babies will be born in 2025, according to Zara Curtis, chief content officer at Mamamia. The Diary Of A Birth podcast will launch in November, hosted by Sarah-Marie Fahd, with expert advice from Dr Golly, and provide “helpful takeaways designed to reassure and educate expectant mothers” in a way that’s not sensational or alarming.
“We never wanna do doomsday reporting,” Sorman Nilsson said. “We never want people to feel scared coming away from our content. We always want people to feel that they’ve learned something, but also that it’s okay. That it’s okay. This is, ‘you’re gonna be okay.’
Commercially speaking, birth is big business.
“From an advertising perspective, parenting content would probably easily be our top desired content for brands,” Curtis explains.
“So our other parenting podcasts, This Glorious Mess, sells out months and months in advance. So there’s huge advertiser demand for the content as well. So we’ve got the audience keen on it, but then we’ve also got quite a big advertiser market as well.”
Nat Harvey
DIVORCE
“We have seen a huge interest in divorce content on site, which suggests that they’re pretty hungry for it,” Harvey explains.
To this end, Mamamia will launch a new podcast and brand, Once Upon A Divorce in 2025, to “connect with women at a time when she’s experiencing huge upheaval”, hosted by New York Times best-selling author Sally Hepworth.
“Our State of Women research suggests that there’s a lot of women unhappy in their marriage,” Harvey continues. “And we’re actually predicting that, next year, divorce rates are going to go up, because all of our signals around content that people are interested in, what’s working well — we see divorce content actually is pretty good for driving new subs.
“And we see that divorce is an area where at the moment, they can’t quite afford to get divorced. There’s financial challenges that come with that. But we think once economic indicators stabilise, that next year we’re going to see a bit of a jump.”
Sorman Nilsson says the podcast will be “very much about the storytelling element, and that advice-through-storytelling that we know really resonates with our audience, because they see a story, they see themselves in it, then they tell us the story – and it allows them to share and feel seen and heard”.
Curtis explains Mamamia ran some divorce content in the past. “We actually did a bespoke podcast with Westpac a number of years ago about helping women prepare and then get through divorce, for financial security.”
WOMEN’S HEALTH
In 2025, Mamamia will launch the ambitious, important One Million Women Project, which will focus on “the big issues we know she is facing”, tackling everything from perimenopause, ADHD, endometriosis, anxiety, contraception, breast cancer, mental health, sexual health, and physical health.
Zara Curtis and Mia Freedman
It will launch in March 2025, with virtual summits, and a slew of other content. The company is also working with AI to translate this content into various other languages, in order to reach the widest possible group of women.
“Whenever we run any content on perimenopause, we get a lot of feedback from our audience saying, ‘thank you for sharing this with me,'” Curtis explains. “A lot of women are a little bit lost around some of their health issues. And so, when we run it in our tone, we get a really good response from our audience. And then again, from an advertiser perspective, the health category is enormous.”
The increased focus on women’s health comes after realising that “whenever we do content on site or on socials around health issues, we just get inundated with other stories, other women wanting to talk about it.” She points to Mia Freedman’s open conversation around her ADHD diagnosis, which came at age 49.
“Once Mia started talking about it, all of a sudden the floodgates were open to our audience speaking about it,” Curtis recalls, “and then a lot of women feeling dismissed about pain — and that’s going to be a big area that the content will lean into as well. It’s like a whole ecosystem of content: the summit, but also written, social, podcasts, it’s a whole world of content to support it.
“That leads right into our trust and purpose too: making the world a better place for women and girls.
“If we can help one million women understand their health needs in 2025, then that’s a pretty big achievement.
“Only Mamamia is a brand we think could do that, given the trust factor that we deal with in our audience every day.”
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Nathan Jolly is the Features Editor at Mumbrella. He joined the team in July, 2023.
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Everybody: Women’s media couldn’t get any more white and privileged.
Mamamia: Hold my beer.
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Oh good, more straight, rich, blonde women hosting Mamamia podcasts
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Only works one way.
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Mamamia’s a fantastic Australian publisher and Australian success story.
Would they like their team to be more diverse? Certainly.
Regardless, isn’t it great they’re still fighting the good fight, growing and competing when so many of their competitors owned by large players underinvest in, or have shuttered their assets and laid off teams?!
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