Christian Petersen/ Getty, Tyler Le/ BI
- Bloomberg reports that Spotify released a new feature showing podcast follower counts.
- Joe Rogan has by far the most popular podcast on Spotify, with 14.5 million followers.
- This doesn't include his YouTube and Apple Podcast audiences.
In 2020, Spotify paid $100 million for the exclusive audio rights to the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. Last month, it renewed its deal with Rogan for a reported $250 million payout over several years (but no longer exclusive rights).
It seems clear that Spotify needs Joe Rogan, and Joe Rogan needs Spotify, who has stood by him even when his show has come under fire for things like spreading vaccine misinformation.
For the first time, there's now a sense of just how big Rogan's podcast audience actually is. Ashley Carman reported in Bloomberg that Spotify started testing a new feature that shows podcasts' follower counts.
The Joe Rogan Experience isn't just the most popular podcast on Spotify — it's almost three times the size of the second most popular (TED Talks Daily), according to Carman's report. At 14.5 million followers, it dwarfs other popular podcasts like The Daily from The New York Times (2.6 million) and This American Life (870,000).
Scoop: It's a generally accepted truth that Joe Rogan's podcast is the biggest on Earth (!) But how massive is his audience?
— Ashley Carman (@ashleyrcarman) March 21, 2024
Last month, Spotify quietly started testing a feature that discloses how many followers podcasts on the platform have.
His show is almost 3X bigger than… pic.twitter.com/AOkbqOb3rg
Carman describes how this figure doesn't even get the full picture of Rogan's total audience:
His Spotify following is still smaller than his subscribers on YouTube, which come in at 16.4 million, and his personal Instagram followers, which are at 18.9 million. But it's worth noting that Rogan accumulated these Spotify followers over just four years — his show wasn't on the platform until he signed an exclusive deal in 2020.
Follower counts don't necessarily translate into listens, but it's still an impressive number. For context, about 42 million people in the US listened to podcasts in 2023, according to Edison Research. It's probably safe to assume, based on the numbers cited by Bloomberg, that a sizable chunk of those listeners are tuned into Joe Rogan.