Voice-Over Market Valued at $4.4 Billion
The global market for voice-over services is worth $4.4 billion per year, according to a new report from Voices.com, an online marketplace for voice over talent and audio services.
Data was collected from Voices.com's database of more than 250,000 national and international job transactions, as well as publicly available industry statistics.
Emerging as the largest spender on voice-over, the entertainment industry accounts for 58 percent of the voice-over work globally. Projects completed for the advertising industry and for business purposes take near equal shares of the global market, at 19 percent and 18 percent respectively. The education sector accounts for 5 percent. Radio commercials represent less than 1 percent of the total market.
In North America, corporate promotional work leads with the greatest share of voice-over at 24 percent.
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 did have 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.
"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.com co-founder and CEO, in a statement. "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."