Italians Love TV, Germans don’t like Facebook

Italy is an interesting market. Despite the 150 newspapers published there, it is television that drives the coverage and generates most of the advertising revenue. Unlike Brits, Italians don’t get their gossip from daily tabloid newspapers, but from weekly magazines. When not reading those and watching TV, you can find Italians listening to radio, more so than any other European nation.

Travel a little bit north to Germany and you’ll find an entirely different picture. Its 82 million people subscribe mostly to regional newspapers. Overall, regional press accounts for 95% subscriptions. Where national press is dominant in other countries like the UK, in Germany strong regional newspapers are in high demand.

Could be that Germans have more time to spend with newspapers than other Europeans, because they spend less on social networking sites. Only 38% of Germans have a social media profile on networks like Facebook.  Actually, Germans probably wouldn’t go to Facebook to start one anyway. Facebook ranks fourth according to ComScore recent ranking of social networks. German website StudiVZ is in the lead. Don’t look to find Facebook in the lead in Russia or Portugal either.

Other countries also challenge the conventional wisdom of who the dominant players are. If you go east of Germany, you’ll enter the Czech Republic where Google is not the number one search engine. It is local search company Seznam.cz that runs 60% of the searches.

When not searching on Seznam.cz, you’ll find Czech spending a lot of their time on their phones and most of them do have more than one! While the cell phone penetration in the U.S. is just under 90%, it is nearly 135% in the Czech Republic. Actually that is not so uncommon in Europe where most countries see penetration rates above 100%. Estonia with 188% is on top of that rating.

Leaving Eastern Europe, going all the way west, you’ll find yourself in arguably the second largest media landscape after the U.S.: the United Kingdom, a country with 48 million people, 400 TV stations and nearly 10,000 magazines. You’ll also be in the country of the top twitter-using city in the world: London. And as the CEO of Twitter Evan Williams told recently BBC, the UK is second only to the US in terms of number of Twitter users.

BBC, the world’s the largest broadcasting corporation, is based in the UK. Funded by an annual television license fee of $235 paid by all UK households, BBC creates content for 8 national TV channels plus regional programming, 10 national radio stations, 40 local radio stations and its website bbc.co.uk. The news division BBC World Service provides news in 32 languages.

France, another large European market with 61 million people, also has one of the world’s largest media organizations: The Agence France Presse (AFP), the national press agency. A team of 2,900 AFP staff including more than 1,400 staff journalists and 700 freelancers works in 165 countries. If you come to London, go visit Paris. It is only two-hour train ride away.

These are just a few interesting facts about a continent where 730 million people live in 48 countries and speak more than two dozens of languages. It is truly exciting and diverse continent!

If you are interested in learning more about European media landscape, visit the European Journalism Centre website.