Europe’s Most Talked About Cities 2024

“Fashion a cultural renaissance to tailor city visibility”

Driving conversations about your city is crucial for inward investment:

Culture is the key component which drives digital content. Using your city’s soft power assets can grow these conversations.
Paris’ elevation to top spot shows the true impact of milestone events.
Geopolitical incidents have the ability to influence a city’s digital visibility.
Cities can stand out amongst their peers by talking more about business and industry, accounting for only 5.4% of all digital content across our 60 cities.
As global cities compete for inward investment in a competitive landscape, increasing your digital visibility works to elevate your investment credentials.

Paris has topped London to become Europe’s Most Talked About City for the first time since the inception of ING Media’s digital visibility rankings. Despite London increasing its digital output by 4% year-on-year, it’s the French capital that takes top spot after conversations about the city jumped 21% from 2022.

Analysis reveals that culture and events are behind this seismic increase in the level of attention focused on Paris. Significant events such as Men’s Fashion Week in January, Paris Fashion Week in September, and The Rugby World Cup in October buoyed the city’s digital content in 2023. Yet the effect of hosting the 2024 Olympic Games is yet to make its mark on Paris’ content footprint, accounting for only 2% of Paris’ overall output in 2023, suggesting that the city could retain its top spot in 2024.

ING Media’s research into Europe’s Most Talked About Cities has entered its sixth year. The research provides critical intelligence into the impact of digital messaging on the success of cities as brands and how this affects investment.

Measuring their digital visibility provides a clear insight into how these cities perform as brands, compared to their peers. ING has identified and ranked the top 60 European cities according to their overall digital profile.

We have taken a forensic approach to revealing what is driving European cities’ digital visibility. However, despite the significant change at the top, the overall ranking of Europe’s most visible cities has remained largely unchanged. The overall total number of online conversations has increased 3.4% and 30 of our 60 cities saw an uplift in digital activity last year.

London, the city which has topped our rankings every year since our reporting began six years ago, appears to be closing the gap on Paris. Despite Paris taking the lead, London has had a good second half. Quarterly analysis of total mentions reveals that content about Paris peaked in the first three months of 2023 and has since reduced.

London’s trajectory points in the opposite direction and the city leads Paris in the last three months of 2023. London can therefore be hopeful of a revival into 2024.

For the first time we analysed which cities are being mentioned the most around inward investment, in order to determine which locations are currently recognised internationally as attractive capital deployment prospects for real estate.

In our last report we noted the increase in city-based content around local and regional political and economic events. The war in Ukraine dominated many top news events throughout Europe in 2022 and continued to do so last year. In 2023 we also see the impact of the ongoing conflict in Gaza.

In the following document we will focus on what is driving conversations across European cities. We unpack which key themes power a city’s visibility, how leveraging your city’s soft power assets can increase your inward investment potential, and which cities are being spoken about most frequently as inward investment destinations.

What is being said about Europe’s most talked about cities?

What is driving European city conversations?

Culture continues to drive European city output. For the last five years, we have ranked the total number of conversations around a series of ING-defined key themes; culture, technology, business, sustainability and talent. The figures below aggregate those results as an average of the 60 cities included in the research.

Which cities are leading on culture-related mentions?

Despite Paris’ increase in cultural-related mentions last year, London’s cultural offering means it is still mentioned the most overall in relation to culture. The top five cities with the highest volume of mentions around culture are:

Which city leads the inward investment conversation?

Paris, London and Barcelona are mentioned the most in relation to inward investment.

We have also measured how many conversations about cities are focused on their investment credentials. These conversations track keywords associated with inward investment to understand which cities are being talked about most on the global stage. Manchester is ranked as the largest UK city outside of London, for Foreign Direct Investment (FDI).

Who is contributing to city’s online visibility?

Research shows that Millennials and Gen-Zs drive European cities’ visibility. Analysis of mentions from 'X' (Twitter) across all cities illustrate the importance of communicating to relevant audiences with your city brand messaging.

ING Media’s investigation into Europe’s Most Talked About Cities (2024) covered 60 cities and ranked them by digital mentions across 2023. These mentions originate from online news, ‘X’ (Twitter), forums, blogs, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, comments and reviews. Spelling variants included to cover the following languages; English, Chinese (simplified), Spanish, Arabic, Portuguese, Japanese, Russian, German, French, Malaysian, Indonesian, as well as the city’s native language. Mentions containing sports, in particular football, have been limited. Key topic shares, generated from a set of keywords unique to each category, represent only English mentions.

ING Media’s Soft Power rankings categorizes our selected 60 cities by several quantifiable social and cultural metrics that impact a city’s potential exposure on a global stage. These metrics include Number of stadia [25,000 capacity and above], number of museums and galleries across all faculties, number of Universities, number of hotel rooms, non-native born population, number of airports that serve city, UNESCO world heritage sites, number of Michelin Star restaurants, annual population change and a ING Media ‘Green Score’ defined by multiple criteria including [City Net Zero Carbon Target [Year], Air Quality [PM2.5 ug/m3], and Green Area [GA, %].

If you would like to learn more about the report and how ING works with cities: citiesunit@ing-media.com

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