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 Joe 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, The Verge looked instead at a secondary metric: how much of a promotional boost Rogan gives his guests. To do this, they 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.
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| Searches for Joe Rogan dropped off after he went to Spotify |
The Verge 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. To isolate the effect, we focused on people who had under 500,000 followers when going on Rogan’s show, since bigger names — someone like Dave Chappelle or Elon Musk — were likely to bring more attention to Rogan than vice versa.
Ashley Carman, The Verge senior reporter, joined ‘TechCheck’ on CNBCto discuss the story.
Taken altogether, The Verge’s data findings suggest that Rogan has lost impact and relevance since going exclusive to Spotify. A sizable portion of his audience likely didn’t follow him when he made the jump.
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