How to reach a global podcast audience

You reach a global podcast audience in three moves: check where your listeners already are, remove anything in your setup that quietly limits distribution, then make sure listens outside your home market are worth something. Podcast RSS has no borders built into it. Most shows are already international before anyone notices.

That last point is the one worth sitting with. Nobody sets out to build an audience in Australia. They look at their location data 18 months in and find 11% of their listening is coming from Melbourne and Sydney, and they have no idea why.

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Start with where you already are, not where you'd like to be

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Before you plan anything, look at what's happening. In Acast Insights, the Location tab breaks your downloads down by country, then by city inside each country, with percentages and a heat map. Click any country to open its cities. Export any of it to CSV.

Three things to know about that data so you read it correctly.

It comes from IP addresses, matched against industry-standard geolocation databases plus the TAG Data Center IP list to weed out fraudulent traffic. That means it's location at the moment of download, not where someone lives. A chunk of your "international" audience in July is your domestic audience on holiday. VPN users land wherever their VPN lands.

City names can look duplicated. You'll see London and Islington, or New York and Brooklyn, listed separately. Those are the underlying IP databases, not a bug in your numbers, and no host can fix it.

The dashboard refreshes every 24 hours, with IAB 2.2 filtering applied the following day. So today's numbers are an estimate and yesterday's are the real ones.

Set a 12-month window and sort by country. If a market you've never thought about is in your top five, that's not a curiosity. That's a decision waiting to be made.

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Check that your distribution isn't quietly domestic

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Getting on Apple Podcasts and Spotify covers a lot of the world, and Apple submission cascades automatically to apps like Overcast and Pocket Casts that pull their listings from Apple. That's most of the English-speaking market handled.

It isn't most of the world. Deezer has real weight in France and francophone markets. JioSaavn matters in India. Podcast Index is an open database of more than 4 million shows that other apps and directories build on, which makes it worth being in for long-term discoverability even though nobody listens on it directly.

In Acast you submit to these from the Distribution tab, mostly in one click, and you only do it once per platform when the show is new. Worth knowing: if your show already appears on a platform, you don't need to activate it. We're already distributing your episodes there and counting those downloads.

This is a 20-minute job you do once. It's also the single most commonly skipped step in every "how do I grow internationally" conversation we have.

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Language is the border, not geography

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Podcasts don't cross borders. They cross languages.

A show in English reaches the US, UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, plus large English-speaking audiences in India, Nigeria, the Philippines and the Nordics. A show in Swedish reaches Swedes, wherever they live. Diaspora audiences are the most reliably underestimated growth channel in podcasting, and they don't show up in any keyword tool.

Two practical consequences.

First, set your show's language correctly in your RSS settings. It's a field most people fill in once and never look at, and it feeds directory categorization and, on Acast, advertiser targeting. Advertisers can filter by show language at no extra cost, versus a premium for geographic targeting, which makes language a cheap way for a brand to find you.

Second, be realistic about translation. Acast doesn't offer translation or dubbing, and neither does any major host right now. Transcripts are available on paid plans in eight languages (English, Spanish, French, German, Dutch, Italian, Norwegian and Swedish), generated on request rather than automatically, and they come out as text you copy rather than something that attaches to your episode or feed. Useful for repurposing into a blog post or a social clip. Not a discovery mechanism, and we'd rather say so than let you assume otherwise.

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Make international listens worth something

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Here's where most advice stops and where the actual business question starts.

Podcast advertising is sold market by market. A campaign on Acast targets one country. If a brand wants to run in the US and the UK, that's two campaigns, priced separately, because the listener pools and the CPMs are different. Advertisers browsing shows see weekly listens in their target market, not your global total, and a CPM for your show in that market specifically.

Which means the sales team in your home country is generally selling against your domestic listens. Your 11% in Australia is invisible to them.

It isn't invisible to everyone. Acast operates locally in the UK, Ireland, US, Canada, France, Germany, Norway, Mexico, Sweden, Australia and New Zealand, and pays creators out in 10 currencies. Across 140,000+ creators and 4,000+ advertisers, a show with a meaningful audience in a market where we have a sales team can be monetized in that market as well as at home. The market your listeners are in is one of the factors in what you earn.

Dynamic ad insertion is what makes this work mechanically. Ads are inserted at playback, not baked into the file, so two people listening to the same episode on the same day in different countries can hear different ads. It also means your back catalog stays monetizable rather than carrying a dead ad from 2023.

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What you can't do, so you don't plan around it

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Three honest limits.

You can't geo-target as a creator. Geographic targeting is an advertiser control. You can see where your listeners are; you can't choose where your show is served.

You can't see revenue by country. The Acast Revenue Dashboard breaks earnings down by show, campaign type, advertiser and individual campaign. There's no country column. So you can prove your audience is 30% Canadian and you can see what you earned, but you can't directly attribute one to the other. That's a real gap and we're not going to pretend it isn't.

Not every ad break fills. Unsold inventory and category mismatch are the usual causes. A growing international audience improves your odds; it doesn't guarantee anything.

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Frequently asked questions

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How do I reach a global podcast audience?

Check your existing listener locations first, since most shows already have international listeners they haven't noticed. Then submit to platforms that matter outside your home market (Deezer, JioSaavn, Podcast Index alongside Apple and Spotify), set your show language correctly in your RSS feed, and choose a host that can sell advertising in more than one country. Podcast feeds are borderless by default, so growth is usually about removing friction rather than adding reach.

Can I see which countries my podcast listeners are in?

Yes. Acast Insights includes a Location tab showing downloads by country and by city within each country, with percentages, over any date range, for the whole show or a single episode, exportable to CSV. It's available on every plan including the free Starter plan. The data is derived from listener IP addresses, so treat travel and VPN use as normal noise.

Can I make money from international podcast listeners?

Yes, if your host sells in those markets. Podcast ads are sold country by country, so a show with listeners in several markets can be monetized in each of them rather than only at home. Acast operates locally across markets including the US, UK, Ireland, Canada, France, Germany, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand and the Nordics, and the markets your listeners are in are one factor in what you earn.

Does my podcast need to be in English to grow internationally?

No. Language defines your reachable audience more than geography does, and shared-language audiences abroad are often bigger than local ones. A Swedish-language show can build a following in the UK. What matters is that your language is set correctly in your feed so directories and advertisers can find you.

How do I get my podcast on apps outside the US and UK?

Submit directly. In Acast, the Distribution tab handles most platforms in one click, and you only do it once per platform when your show is new. Apple submission also cascades to apps that pull from Apple's directory. Regional platforms like Deezer and JioSaavn need their own submission and are the ones most creators forget.

Can I target podcast listeners in a specific country?

Not as a creator. Geographic targeting is an advertiser-side control, applied at the ad-serving layer using the listener's IP address. You can see where your audience is and grow deliberately toward a market, but you can't restrict or direct where your episodes are served.

Most creators treat international listeners as a rounding error until the day they don't. The data is sitting in your dashboard now. Worth an hour to find out which country you're accidentally famous in.