Compounded by the fact that it’s adding access to talent agents and their unionized voice actors to the site’s current offering of professional non-union voice actors, Voices.com is seeing an exponential increase in traffic on its platform at a global scale.
“To be able to help those talent agents and union actors gain access to this global network of job opportunities is another piece for us that we’re really excited about,” Alina Morkin, the platform’s VP of marketing told itbusiness.ca, after the initial announcement.
The London-based company purchased California-based voicebank.net last summer, and starting Feb. 1, the two will unite under one brand – Voices.com. The financial terms of that deal have still not been disclosed. Voices.com has clients in 139 countries, 400,000 registered users and records approximately 2 million unique visitors to its website annually. More than 18,000 of the 200,000 voice over actors registered with voice.com are from Canada.
“We’re seeing some great growth and interesting projects in our backyard,” said Morkin.
That growth is also visible in the demand for non-English voice overs. From 2016 to 2017, the demand for non-English voice over grew by 60 per cent, while the number of job postings calling for English only grew by 43 per cent.
The company’s growth and diversification of the producers it works with has led to some interesting moments, according to Morkin, pointing to August 2016, when a response to a video game company’s call for voice over talent resulted in a tenfold increase in traffic to their website. It turned out the request had shed some light on a game that was unreleased at the time, Five Nights at Freddy’s: Sister’s Location, which piqued the interest of video game enthusiasts across the globe.
“We were worried we were getting hacked,” laughed Morkin.
And while robots are gaining a strong foothold in various industries, there appears to be little room for them in the voice over market.
Voices.com recently released its latest trends report, which says 93 per cent of respondents agree that the human voice is more powerful than a synthetic one.
“The producers we talk to tell us that establishing a connection on an emotional level is the most important thing,” Alina Morkin, VP of marketing told itbusiness.ca, adding the human voice is the only thing that can currently achieve that.
However, the increasing popularity of voice-first devices such as Echo and Google Home, which are still dominated by artificial voices, could open the doors for voice over actors.
“Voice over actors are observing interest in that space,” said Morkin.