Comparatively, in Germany and South Africa, listenership was much lower on a weekly basis, at 9% and 6%, respectively. The podcast listener numbers follow a general trend in digital audio consumption in Canada, where 70% of respondents said they listened in the past month, compared with 67% in the US.

In South Africa, for example, the share of internet users who’d read a print newspaper in the month prior to polling fell almost 10 percentage points, and magazine penetration plunged 17 percentage points. Significant drops were also seen in Colombia, Hong Kong, and Romania, among others. There’s no doubt that the pandemic is further complicating an already complex picture.

As shown in the chart in the Worldwide section, South Africa ranks No. 3, Nigeria No. 4, Egypt No. 7, the UAE No. 9 and Saudi Arabia No. 10. Facebook Is Widely Used by Social Network Users in the Middle East and Africa. Facebook has extraordinarily high penetration among social network users in the Middle East and Africa, at 96.2% in 2019.

Indonesia, India and South Africa Are the Fastest-Growing Markets. Indonesia and India top the list of fastest-growing markets in 2019, posting growth rates of 9.9% and 9.7%, respectively. South Africa was not far behind, at 9.4%.

In an April 22-27 survey conducted by GlobalWebIndex, for example, 45% of internet users worldwide said they were spending more time with messaging services like WhatsApp and Messenger because of the pandemic, with that figure reaching more than half in India (57%), South Africa (57%), Brazil (56%), Spain (54%), Italy (51%), and the Philippines (51%).