Despite its relatively small size, Belgium has an interesting media landscape in the European landscape. While placing #14 in Europe in terms of overall media revenue, it ranks #6 for audio and #10 for Cinema, speaking to the unique media consumption habits of the country.
Additionally, the country’s geopolitical structure means there are largely two separate media markets to look at: Dutch-speaking Flanders and French-speaking Wallonia.
At the turn of the century, Germany was the biggest media revenue earner, earning 53% more revenue than the next biggest market, the United Kingdom. France, Italy, and Spain round out the top 5 markets.
The ranking of the top 5 remained stable though we see a dip in global ad revenue in 2009 following The Great Recession.
The inflection point comes in 2015, when the United Kingdom pulls ahead of Germany to become the biggest media revenue generator in the region. In 2021, the United Kingdom earned nearly 90% more media revenue than Germany.
United Kingdom, Germany, and France are the top revenue earners across channels in 2021. We see some outliers, such as Switzerland generating significant revenue from Cinema and Austria being the third-highest revenue generator for Newspapers in Europe.
Two decades ago, the Belgian media landscape was dominated by television and print advertising. In the mid-2000s, audio became a prominent channel.
Five years ago, digital media overtook newspapers to become the second biggest media channel and as of 2020, cemented itself as the biggest media earner in the country.
Time spent on mobile has seen the biggest growth, from under one hour in 2015 to nearly two and a half hours each day in 2021. Related to this is the rise in consumption of music streaming services and podcasts which we know are mainly accessed via mobile.
It's interesting to note that the rise of new channels hasn’t caused a significant decline of usage in more mainstream channels. If anything, overall media consumption time has grown in the past half decade by 3 hours.
In five years from now, revenue from Digital will be nearly 60% more than revenue from the second biggest channel, Television. Non-Search channels will account for 80% of revenue from Digital.
