Setting Boundaries for The Biggest Podcaster In The World Joe Rogan / It was A $100 Million Dollar-Deal

Let Ashley Carman from The Verge tell the story

(Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge | Photo by Vivian Zink/NBCUniversal via Getty Images)

 

Joe Rogan, confined to Spotify, is losing influence

A Verge investigation shows how going exclusive stunted Rogan’s power

By Ashley Carman@ashleyrcarman Aug 25, 2021, 9:30am EDT

 

 

Insert the start, then you finish doing more reading 

"When Spotify decided to try to become the biggest podcasting platform in the world, it knew it needed a nuclear weapon: Joe Rogan. The comedian turned podcasting icon has become impossible to miss and a force in the industry. He’s hosted legitimate politicians like Bernie Sanders and wannabes like Kanye West, smoked a joint with Elon Musk, and schmoozed with huge celebrities like Dave Chappelle and Miley Cyrus. With a self-asserted reach of more than 200 million monthly downloads in 2019, Rogan is one of the biggest — if not the biggest — podcaster in the world.

Spotify hoped he would bring much of that audience along with him when he signed exclusively to the platform in 2020 in a reported $100 million deal, giving it the reach and power needed to take over the podcasting industry. Although Spotify hasn’t given specific numbers detailing Rogan’s listenership since he came on board, it has repeatedly boasted about his success. The company confirmed that he quickly became the platform’s biggest podcaster after jumping to Spotify. He “stimulated new user additions, activated first time podcast listeners, and [has] driven favorable engagement trends, including vodcast consumption,” the company wrote in a February 2021 earnings release. In April, it said Rogan’s show had “performed above expectations” in regards to adding new users to the platform and engagement.

However, a new data investigation by The Verge finds that the powerful podcaster’s influence has waned since he went behind Spotify’s wall. His show has declined as a hype vehicle for guests, and Rogan’s presence as a mainstay in the news has plummeted.

Because Spotify doesn’t share how many plays each podcast gets, or how many unique listeners regularly tune in, we looked instead at a secondary metric: how much of a promotional boost Rogan gives his guests. To do this, we pulled data from the analytics tool Social Blade to track the Twitter following of every guest who went on Rogan’s podcast between December 2019 and July 2021. Guests generally see a surge of new followers after appearing on the show, with some gaining as many as 18,000 new followers in the week following their chat, and that effect has grown over time as The Joe Rogan Experience gained popularity. While we can’t attribute every new follower to Rogan — guests might have been on a media tour to promote a new movie or book, for instance — the bump after a Rogan appearance is constant.

We found that prior to going exclusive, from December 2019 to November 2020, Rogan’s guests could expect to gain around 4,000 Twitter followers in the week after their episode premiered. After he went exclusive, that number declined by half to around 2,000, suggesting a drop in listeners. . .

You can see the totality of our findings below. We plotted the average number of followers gained month by month. The drop doesn’t look monumental, due to the presence of a couple outlier months, but broadly, you can see that following Rogan’s move to going exclusive, his guests gain fewer followers on average. Even the best months as a Spotify exclusive show only rival the worst months when his show was widely available.

We attempted to look into this for Instagram, as well, but Social Blade only had data on about half of the guests — not enough to create a complete picture of the trends. (Still, we saw that the number of followers gained on Instagram declined significantly for those available.)