Lemya Soltani, Co-Founder and CCO, NextAudio.Advertiser demand across the Next Audio network grew 67 per cent from 2024 to 2025. Digging into the composition of this growth, the signals of a media channel moving from early adoption into a permanent position are clear: brands are deepening their commitment, extending campaigns, and increasing budgets. Average campaign spend increased 30 per cent year-on-year.
The reason advertisers are seeing such success in the channel comes down to the scale and engagement of the audience itself. In Saudi Arabia, 67 per cent of the population listens to podcasts every week and in the UAE, 57 per cent do. The Middle East and Africa recorded 21.2 per cent year-on-year growth in monthly listeners in 2025 – the fastest rate of any region globally. The UAE market alone is projected to grow at 34.3 per cent CAGR through 2030. This is one of the most engaged, fastest-growing media audiences on the planet.
What are they listening to? Five years of listenership data collected across the Next Audio network shows the top five genres as society and culture, education, news, business and sports. Ads delivered within that content recorded completion rates above 98 per cent in 2025 – ad completion, not episode completion. Society and culture alone records a 99.49 per cent ad listen-through rate.
Podcast listening is an active, chosen behaviour, and that same attention carries through to the ads running within it. That is what is producing the campaign results driving brands to return and increase their spend.
A pattern in podcast success already documented elsewhere
Within the MENA podcast market, finance, travel, banking and real estate are the leading advertiser categories. What is interesting about this specific group is that these are the exact same categories that led podcast advertising maturity in the United States. And that tells us something worth paying attention to.
In Q4 2025, financial services was the largest spending category in US podcast advertising, putting $109.6m into the channel in a single quarter, up 31 per cent year-on-year. Travel ran the same trajectory. The US reaching spend maturity in emerging media channels before other markets is a pattern documented across programmatic, social and CTV, and other markets follow, typically two to three years later, with the same
leading verticals.
In MENA, it is the same industries finding the same success. A financial services brand running host-read campaigns in Saudi Arabia recorded a 28 per cent lift in brand consideration and 97 per cent ad completion. Real estate developers running campaigns across the UAE and KSA in 2025 (independently, across four separate brands) recorded completion rates of 97-98 per cent. The reinvestment visible in the network data reflects what happens when rigorous categories run the numbers and like what they see.
So what’s next? In the US, the categories that followed finance and travel into podcast advertising were retail, technology, and consumer goods. In MENA, that wave is forming right now. If you are in one of those categories, consider this your sign.
The case for staying in
Podcast advertising in MENA now has the depth to support genuine always-on presence. Arabic and English content, local shows with deeply loyal regional audiences sitting alongside internationally recognised titles – the breadth of what is available to advertisers in this market reflects a channel that has matured.
Edison Research and Nielsen found that reallocating just 5 per cent of a media plan into podcasts can increase reach among adults 18 to 54 by 41 per cent. The same budget. 41 per cent more reach. For any planner looking at how to get more from what they already have, that is a difficult number to ignore.
The data from five years of campaigns in this market points in one direction. The audience is here, growing fast and deeply engaged, the advertiser results are proven across the most demanding categories in the region, and as the US has already shown us, we know exactly where this goes. MENA is well on that journey.
By Lemya Soltani, Co-Founder and CCO, Next Audio.
