Mamamia gears up for Youtube podcast push

Mamamia is investing heavily in a video push that it hopes will grow its podcasting audience through Youtube.

As part of the video drive, the female-focussed media company has fitted out its new Sydney office with vodcasting studios, a control room, voiceover booth and infinity cove studio. 

CEO Natalie Harvey told Mumbrella that Mamamia was reaching between 1.2-1.5 million listeners through podcasts every month, and that the best way to grow that number was through Youtube.

Natalie Harvey and Zara Curtis

Podcast consumption on Youtube is big: Google (Youtube’s owner) says podcasts reach over a billion people on the platform every month, and Youtube is ranked the biggest podcasting platform in the US.

Consumption is driven by big shows like The Joe Rogan Experience (around 20 million Youtube subscribers) and true crime podcast Rotten Mango (5.3 million subscribers). Youtube has been publishing a US podcasting leaderboard from May that shows there is very little overlap between the top podcasts on Apple, Spotify and Youtube.

This points to the kind of incremental opportunity that the Mamamia team wants to exploit.

“Looking at where the business is going and where the opportunity is. I guess the first thing we started with was video,” Harvey said. “We’ve seen some of the really big brands have had massive success on YouTube, and Spotify’s pushing into that space as well.”

“We’ve got a very loyal audio audience, but if we want to drive growth in the business, we saw video as the space where we needed to be playing more. It also gives us the opportunity to go global, because we don’t have any geographical barriers on our content.”

Recording for Mamamia’s entertainment podcast The Spill was underway when Mumbrella toured the new office on George Street. The show is a good example of how Mamamia is treading the line between the audio-only format of a traditional podcast and a native video product.

Hosts Laura Brodnik and Ksenija Lukich sit looking at each other in the colourful studio, speaking into mics on boom arms. The show cuts between a wide two-shot and individual mid-shots of the presenters using the studio’s three cameras. There is also occasional overlay video and stills of whatever they are talking about.

While the set, lighting and cameras are excellent, the show is not TV-ready: the hosts don’t look at the camera, they look at each other, and there’s not enough overlay to satisfy a TV director. This is exactly as intended, because the playbook for video on Youtube is different from TV, as Mamamia Chief Content Officer Zara Curtis explains.

Opening shot from The Spill

“We wanted it to still be up close and personal. You notice how we shoot quite authentically, and that’s important to us,” she says. “The danger is we go too hi-fi, we don’t want that, it’s a waste of time. These studios are there to be played with, they look very premium and very lovely, but they’re there to be deconstructed as well. So we don’t mind if people jump in there and just film standing up, walking around. We’ve got to be really conscious of authenticity and conscious of changing.”

The move into video in general and Youtube in particular is not without challenges. Revenue on Youtube is less than what Mamamia can extract from the same listener on an audio podcast, and the production turn-around time on a vodcast is much longer than a podcast.

“It can take us 48 hours to turn around a weekly show,” Curtis says. “We want to get that right down and be able to jump in the studio within an hour as news breaks, be it entertainment news, or what’s relevant to women in fashion, beauty, parenting, all the verticals we cover.”

There is also the question of the talent.

The biggest new Mamamia studio

“We’ve got a job to get all of our hosts comfortable with video, it’s a different style of presenting and a different style of show. And I think that’s going to unleash the formats that we play with … it’ll give us a new opportunity to invent really low-fi chat shows that are quick to turn around. We’re talking about this already.”

Curtis was helped with the studio build by Cat Raven of Catravenland, with furniture from Fenton and Fenton. Harvey would not disclose the cost of the studio builds or the overall budget of the office fit-out.

In terms of revenue, Harvey is comfortable as long as she is reaching incremental audience.

She references Mamamia’s foray into podcasting in 2015 with founder Mia Friedman’s Out Loud podcast as evidence of the organisation’s ability to spot opportunity early. 

“The ad revenue on YouTube is less than what audio is, but we are building for the future,” Harvey said. 

“Mamamia was the first to go big into podcasts, and now we are gonna be the first that goes big into vodcasts as well … when you’re in that leadership position, you’ve got to make sure that you’ve got studios and space that enables you to be able to do that.”

“The podcast market has a 20% CAGR [compound annual growth] for the next five years, listening in Australia’s only 48% penetration at the moment. So that means there’s 52% of people that don’t listen to a podcast. And then if you overlay video to that as well, so you’d probably get to a space where video and podcast is one line on a P&L [profit and loss report].”

“That market’s enormous. I think it’s almost a $10 billion market.”

Correction: In the Mumbrellacast podcast which aired parts of the conversation with Harvey and Curtis, the author incorrectly stated that The Quicky in 2019 was Mamamia’s first podcast. As above, Out Loud in 2015 holds that honour.