It looks like podcasting in Europe is taking a very different road to that of the USA which enjoys much better monetisation opportunities. It’s a matter of scale, with the European market being much smaller than in America.
The article below from Forbes suggests that things aren’t all they seem, with some European countries having proportionally the same and in some cases more, than in the USA. It will be interesting to see how each market develops and which one does it more quickly.
It would be unthinkable in the U.S. market to get hundreds of podcasters to commit to exclusive distribution through a new podcast app with little pre-existing audience, no upfront money, and no advertising. But then the podcasting market in Europe is in a much different state than it is in America. The factors that contribute to Podimo’s promising start don’t exist here.
One reason for the lack of podcast ad infrastructure is that Europe consists of over three dozen countries that speak about as many different languages. There’s demand for podcasts in local languages, but this limits the audience—and therefore the ad revenue scalability—for podcasts in any one such language. Therefore it makes sense that the top European markets for podcasts, in terms of percentage of population that listens to them, are countries with languages that are spoken widely around the world: according to December 2018 figures from WARC and the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, the top countries are Spain, Ireland, Switzerland, France, and Nordic countries (where English fluency is high).
From forbes.com
