Despite rapid growth in Arabic-language podcast listenership, ad spend hasn’t kept up. Charlotte McEleny spoke to Acast, McCann Content Studios MENA, and Havas Media MENA about what is holding ad spend back, why the region’s measurement argument remains unresolved, and which markets get overlooked while Saudi Arabia and the UAE take the attention…

Podcasting in MENA has passed the point where audience growth is the story. Arabic-language shows have built durable listenership across the Gulf and North Africa, production values have risen, and the region now supports networks, studios, and original IP rather than a scattering of passion projects.

The commercial layer has moved more slowly, and Egypt offers the clearest picture. "GWI data indicates around 64% of Egypt’s online population listen to podcasts weekly, yet fewer than 10% report encountering podcast advertising," says Megan Davies, managing director, international at Acast. "The monetisation gap remains substantial across the wider region."

The distance between what the region listens to and what advertisers pay for is now the market’s defining feature, and the explanation depends entirely on who you ask. Three practitioners – working across a global platform, a creative agency, and a media agency – offer three different diagnoses: the buying education, the ad format, or the measurement itself.

Why brands are sitting it out

Davies says the region’s revenue base is still largely built by hand. "Today, the bulk of revenue comes from direct sponsorship, branded content, and bespoke partnerships, with programmatic and other scalable models still developing," she says. "The commercial appetite is accelerating, as our MENA partner, Next Audio, reported advertiser demand across its network up 67% year-on-year (2024 to 2025), with average campaign spend up 30%."

Next Audio is Acast’s sales partner across the region, and the growth is measured off a base neither company discloses. Even in the markets that do attract budget, Davies argues the problem is positioning rather than plumbing.

"While ad spend in these markets is growing, many regional marketers still treat podcasting as an experimental add-on rather than a core channel," she explains. "While historical global concerns around brand safety, buying friction, and attribution have already been solved, the real task in MENA today is education – helping brands understand modern campaign planning and podcast advertising formats so they can capture under-monetised, highly engaged audiences."

Naveen Chacko Matthews, managing director at Havas Media MENA, sees the same reluctance from the buying side.

"While listenership continues to significantly grow, brands are slow to jump on the wagon purely because they don’t see the need to develop creative or ads specifically for this space," he says. "Often the brands that do activate within the podcast space end up running a normal radio spot they have on hand, rather than doing something bespoke."

On the mechanics, Chacko Matthews and Davies part company. "Tracking is another issue that is complicated as well, with most not having a clickable ad option," he adds. "Some of the bigger brands that are very picky on brand safety often stay away as the brand safety implementation is not as advanced as other platforms."

Acast lists brand safety and attribution as globally solved but locally under-adopted, while Havas says they’re missing at the point of buying. Whichever reading is right, the brands with the biggest budgets are the ones waiting for the answer.

The ad format as the barrier

Ibrahim Hasan, regional head of McCann Content Studios MENAT, blames the ad unit itself: "The primary barrier is the advertising format itself, to be blunt. On platforms like Spotify and Anghami, ads often arrive abruptly, breaking the flow and disrupting an engaged listener’s experience."

"Monetisation options are also narrow: platform ads, audience scale, or straight sponsorship. That pushes podcasts toward brand partnerships, but few Arabic shows have cracked immersive integration," he adds.

His reference points for what integration should look like sit at both ends of the market. "Joe Rogan’s partnership with Perplexity shows what is possible. The product contributes to the conversation instead of interrupting it. At a MENA level, Thmanyah does this well, building brands into the premise of shows, such as when e-com aggregators become part of the conversation within their podcast, Sawalif Business. Injected rather than proclaimed as a sponsor."

Hasan comments, "The money will follow when branded content feels useful, native, engaging, and authentic."

Chacko Matthews arrives at the same conclusion from the media planning side, describing brands that "don’t often seek to integrate into the content of the podcast in a way that is authentic and think beyond just placing an ad".

Both describe a creative failure that presents as a media failure. The inventory is being
filled with assets built for a different medium rather than rejected on price. Measurement is a monetisation problem. The industry’s default explanation for slow audio spend is measurement, and this is where the three disagree most.

Davies argues the tooling is already in place and buyers are applying the wrong yardstick. "The measurement capability in MENA is far more mature than many advertisers realise. Globally, podcasting has long moved past its 'unmeasurable' era, and the same tools are fully operational in the region today," she says.

"The real friction isn’t a tech gap; it’s an education gap. Regional buyers accustomed to visual digital channels often apply immediate social media frameworks, like instant click- through rates, to an audio medium that drives fundamentally different consumer behaviours."

Once advertisers evaluate audio on verified reach, brand recall and conversion lift, she adds, "trust in attribution builds very quickly".

Chacko Matthews rates the capability lower. "Measurement in MENA is improving, but it is still relatively nascent compared with more established digital channels. We can measure delivery, reach, and engagement reasonably well, but the challenge is connecting audio exposure to a tangible business outcome," he notes. "Advertisers still question the consistency of measurement across platforms and publishers, and whether reported listens or downloads represent genuine exposure and attention."

His route out is familiar for channels that resist click-based attribution: moving beyond platform-reported metrics to "a combination of brand lift, incrementality and broader attribution or media-mix modelling".

Hasan’s objection is to the metric the region has settled on in the first place: "Measurement in MENA audio is still too focused on headline reach. Listener numbers can be overstated, and the industry often treats scale as the main proof of value. But the real measure is retention: how long people listen, the average session duration and whether they complete an episode."

"Claims about being a top 50, top 100 or top 200 podcast have become so common that they risk losing meaning. Advertisers should be sceptical of vanity metrics and demand evidence of sustained attention. Reach tells you who arrived; retention tells you whether the content worked properly," he adds.

For a market trying to persuade brands that podcast audiences are worth paying for, the absence of an agreed currency is itself a monetisation problem. Buyers cannot benchmark a channel that its own suppliers describe as variously mature, nascent, and measuring the wrong thing.

The markets left behind

Saudi Arabia and the UAE absorb most of the regional budget, which leaves a set of markets producing content that almost no regional budget reaches.

"The overlooked markets are Lebanon, Palestine, and Egypt. Lebanon and Palestine are producing remarkable local talent and using podcasts to explore social topics, entrepreneurship, and the realities of their societies," says Hasan. "Egypt is close to Saudi Arabia in the diversity of its output, the quality of its hosts and the strength of its formats. Yet it receives less regional attention because much of the content is distinctly Egyptian. Saudi- and UAE-based shows, such as the UAE’s ArabCast, often travel more easily across the GCC and wider Middle East. The next wave will come from strong local voices finding broader regional distribution channels."

Davies makes the same case for Egypt in commercial terms. "Networks like TPP Network demonstrate that Egypt has the audience, the culturally rich talent, and the listener loyalty, but brand spend hasn’t caught up to the volume of consumption yet," she says.

Chacko Matthews also flags Egypt as the growth market within the MENA cluster, while noting that Saudi Arabia and the UAE remain the focus for most brands because of their scale.

The constraint in Egypt is distribution. Regional buyers plan at GCC level, and Egyptian shows rarely carry beyond Egypt, so a large, engaged audience sits outside the campaigns being bought.

Where the money goes next

All three expect the next tranche of investment to follow the audience across formats rather than into audio inventory.

"Podcasting is inherently multimodal, and audiences move fluidly between watching and listening based on their environment," says Davies. "YouGov research highlights that the UAE is one of the most video-forward podcast markets globally, with 60% of podcast consumers preferring video compared to 20% who prefer audio-only."

That reorders what a podcast buy actually contains, and Hasan takes this further by describing an audience that engages with a show without ever pressing play.

"You have millions of social audiences that watch clips, follow conversations, or recognise a show without ever playing a full episode," he explains. "We’re quite literally talking about consuming a podcast without ever listening to it, something that is unique to this format."

His conclusion is that the sellable unit is the whole package: "long-form YouTube, short- form social, talkability on X, and live experiences through platforms like Snap." Short-form content, Hasan adds, "is abundant, forgettable, and thanks to AI, ever-increasing, but the recall a distinctive conversation delivers to an end-user remains the most valuable thing a podcast can offer to an advertiser".

Chacko Matthews frames the same conclusion as a budgeting decision. "Investment will follow audiences and creators rather than formats. We will see more investment going into strong local and Arabic content, influential hosts, and shows that can extend across audio, video and social," he says. "The opportunity is less about buying a podcast as a standalone audio channel and more about using the strength and credibility of that content across multiple consumer touchpoints."

This turns the monetisation gap into a packaging question. All three describe the sellable unit as a creator with reach across audio, video and social rather than a slot inside an audio file. Thmanyah and ArabCast already sell on those terms. Egypt has the audience, the hosts and the listener loyalty to do the same; Lebanon and Palestine have the talent, and the advantage goes to whoever plans for it first. While none of that settles how the channel gets measured, it does suggest the money may move towards creators while the industry is still arguing about the metric.