Speaking is not a global market

German, a Swede, An American and a Brit walk into a conference. The American walks out laughing. He laughs the loudest, if the topic of the conference is technology or business. Then he probably visits the bank.

In a world where we are all interconnected, it is easy to think that all territories and nations share topics and estimate value in roughly the same way. We all want to make money, right? So speaking about business should be valuable everywhere. It seems reasonable, but this assumption is very far from true.

If you wonder about the differences in the speaker market this is a good place to start. While the picture clearly shows, that the Americans are doing better than most in terms of fee level (You can read all about it in the report on fee levels), it is less clear how they do in terms of talking about society as a whole. The differences are quite significant, and this is good to know if you want to speak in another country.

To get an idea of what is happening (and where), we've put together the following overview, that shows how different societies value talks on specific issues:

For instance - when it comes to looking at the topic of 'Society' the American advantage is not so great. The Brits are almost on the same level when it comes to this dimension of the public sphere. Of course, since Brexit was decided in June of 2016, speaking about politics has matured considerably as a market in The UK.

Another interesting way to look at it is this. What do people even talk about.

When looking at the topics of the US speaker market, no clearly defined sense-cluster could contain topics of society. They are just not there. This landscape is in stark contrast to the topic models of other countries, like Denmark, where issues like 'schools' and 'Children' take up a lot more space. So probably the Danes just talk more about the way they want their society to work, and thus (relatively) appreciate speakers who solve issues in this domain more.

No matter which way you look at it, you should keep in mind when working globally as a speaker, that these differences are very real. Harnessing them could be your path to a global career.

Join us in exploring the global differences of speaking right here on SpeakersLoft.