Voices Report Finds Global Voice Over Market Commands $4.4 Billion Annually

Voices, the largest global online marketplace for voice over talent and audio services, released the Report on the Global Voice Over Market today. This report for the first time sheds light on the size and scope of the voice over market worldwide, revealed to be worth a significant $4.4 billion annually.

Despite being a 100-year-old industry, with hundreds of thousands working in the voice over space, scant research is available. Voices’s Report on the Global Voice Over Market is the first of its kind to analyze the voice over industry on a worldwide scale. Data was collected from Voices’s database of more than 250,000 national and international job transactions, as well as publicly available industry statistics. The report also covers the opportunities that exist within the industry, including areas of interest and growth.

Emerging as the largest spender on voice over, the entertainment industry accounts for 58 percent of the voice over work completed globally. Perhaps surprisingly, projects completed for the advertising industry and for business purposes take near equal shares of the global work done, at 19 and 18 percent respectively. The education sector rounds out the remainder at 5 percent. In North America, however, corporate promotional work leads with the greatest share of voice over at 24 percent.

On a more granular level, there are some unexpected findings regarding the type of projects and where they happen geographically. While radio commercials are often what come to mind when thinking of voice over, those projects actually represent less than 1 percent of the total market. Globally, animation – specifically videos less than 20 minutes – represent slightly more than half of the total work done, but in North America only about one fifth of total voice over spending. North America, on the other hand, had proportionately much greater shares of the total work completed in corporate promotional videos, internet videos and audiobook projects, with those happening significantly more often than elsewhere in the world. This geographic discrepancy is seen as significant and predictive of broader trends.

“Considering the research findings against our internal data, we are seeing a significant shift in the role and prevalence of voice over,” noted David Ciccarelli, Voices co-founder and CEO. “In North America, we’re not observing an actual decline in animation work, but the growth of other types of projects is growing at a faster rate. Consider how video has become part of our daily lives; social streams, formerly full of pictures, are now near exclusively full of video. Whether those are promo reels, educational pieces or otherwise, they require a voice. This auditory dimension of how we consume media is prevalent in ways we’ve never seen before, and we expect this shift in North America to be experienced further on a global level.”

To read the complete report, visit https://www.voices.com/company/press/reports/2017-global-voice-over-market-report

About Voices
Founded in 2005, Voices is the largest global online marketplace for audio and voice over products and services comprised of nearly half a million business clients and voice actors. Its flagship website, www.voices.com, records approximately two million unique visitors annually and has enabled over 250,000 transactions to date. Headquartered in London, Canada, the Company employs more than 100 people and has clients and voice talent in 139 countries.