“War Room” Among the Fastest-Growing Conservative Podcasts

“Bannon’s War Room,” a podcast hosted by former Trump advisor Steve Bannon, has become one of the fast-growing conservative news podcasts, according to TheRighting’s exclusive analysis based on Castbox data.

The show, which runs roughly 50 minutes every weekday, added 677 new subscribers on the Castbox app in June 2021. It ranked third for the month behind “The Ben Shapiro Show” (added 3,044 subscribers) and “The Dan Bongino Show” (added 1,214 subscribers). However, “Bannon’s War Room” has attracted only 7,851 subscribers on the Castbox app through June 30, which is not enough to land in TheRighting’s top 20 conservative news podcast chart (see full chart here). “The Ben Shapiro Show” leads all conservative news podcasts with 422,781 subscribers on the Castbox app.

“At Bannon’s rate of growth, he should crack our top 20 in July or August,” said Howard Polskin, President of TheRighting.

“Candace,” a new podcast featuring young conservative Black political commentator Candace Owens, pulled in 609 subscribers in June, ranking as the fourth fast-growing conservative news podcast.

The “Louder with Crowder” right-wing podcast was the only program in TheRighting’s top 20 that lost subscribers. It declined by 342 subscribers, but still ranked as the #3 podcast in total subscribers with 85,072.

Among mainstream and liberal news podcasts that TheRighting follows, only two generated more subscribers than “The Ben Shapiro Show”: the BBC’s “Global News Podcast” (4,069) and “The Daily” (3,499) from The New York Times. They are also the only two news podcasts with more subscribers that Ben Shapiro’s podcas.

Methodology

This report is based on data that is updated daily from the podcast app Castbox, which is the fifth most popular app on the podcast-hosting platform Buzzsprout. Castbox represents 2.8% of all podcasts that Buzzsprout serves ranking behind Spotify (30.6%), Apple Podcasts (27.2%), Google Podcasts (2.9%) and Web Browser (2.8%%). No other leading podcast app besides Castbox makes its data available.