It’s Official: Joe Rogan's Metrics Are Massive

People in the podcast industry have a sense of who the medium’s biggest stars are. Forbes columist Ashley Carman writes Joe Rogan is widely accepted as the most popular podcaster, trailed by a variety of programs that regularly pop up on the podcast charts and surface in survey data from Edison Research.

Last month, Spotify quietly began testing a feature that shows just how popular Rogan and other podcasters actually are. The feature appears on the landing pages of shows on Spotify’s mobile app. If you have access, you should see a tiny rectangle on the left side that, if tapped, will begin playing swipeable previews of episodes. That page looks and acts a lot like TikTok, down to a button on the right side that allows listeners to follow the podcast. Though it’s unlabeled, it’s there that you can see the number of followers a podcast has.

Rogan is huge. However, 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.

Podcasters’ audiences span platforms. These days, Rogan is back on YouTube and Apple Podcasts, as is Alex Cooper of Call Her Daddy , and video clips from podcasts like New Heights travel far and wide on the internet. Plus, not all followers listen to every episode. Some might never tune in.

“This number represents the number of users who have decided to ‘follow’ a show on Spotify — it doesn't represent a show’s total audience or the performance of an episode,” Spotify said in a comment. “The early feedback from both creators and users has been encouraging. We have no further details to share at this time.”

A few other insights from these numbers, particularly about the behind-the-scenes thinking around the pandemic-fueled, celebrity podcast fad. Emily Ratajkowski’s High Low, for example, ended its run with Sony Music Entertainment with 129,000 followers. A podcast with Katy Perry as a host only reached 5,000 followers. Seth Rogen’s Storytime (a show I personally really enjoyed) got to 102,000. Meghan Markle’s Archetypes accrued a lot of interest – it reached 696,000 followers – and was picked up by Lemonada last month.

You also see how having a massive fanbase isn’t a requirement for financial success. Matt McCusker and Shane Gillis’ podcast is one of the most popular on Patreon with over 85,000 paid members, yet they only have 312,000 Spotify followers. Still, they likely make hundreds of thousands of dollars a month from their subscribers. Chapo Trap House has over 41,000 paid subscribers, earning them $175,900 per month, and they only have 127,000 Spotify followers.