Unusual Whales

Joe Rogan's podcast audience is the highest of all listened podcasts, and it is 3x the next biggest

Unusual Whales -

Joe Rogan's podcast audience is the highest of all listened podcasts, and it is 3x the next biggest, per Bloomberg.


Last month, Spotify quietly began testing a feature that reveals the popularity of Rogan and other podcasters. This feature, which is not publicly named, appears on the landing pages of shows on Spotify’s mobile app. If you have access, you should see a small rectangle on the left side that, when tapped, will start playing swipeable previews of episodes. This page looks and behaves a lot like TikTok, complete with a button on the right side that allows listeners to follow the podcast. Although it's unlabeled, you can see the number of followers a podcast has there.

As of this morning, Rogan’s show has 14.5 million followers. That’s nearly three times more than the next most followed program, TED Talks Daily. Below, you can see a chart documenting the popularity of various shows. I highlighted programs that made it on Spotify’s top 10 global podcasts list last year, as well as programs on Edison’s top 10 podcasts in the US last quarter. Some shows, like SmartLess and Dateline NBC, didn’t have the functionality enabled on their pages yet because the feature hasn’t rolled out completely, said a Spotify spokesperson over email.

While Rogan's following on Spotify is smaller than his subscribers on YouTube, which are at 16.4 million, and his personal Instagram followers, which are at 18.9 million, 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.

However, there are caveats to this figure. Podcasters’ audiences are spread across 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.”

These numbers provide insights into the behind-the-scenes thinking around the pandemic-fueled, celebrity podcast trend. For example, Emily Ratajkowski’s High Low ended its run with Sony Music Entertainment with 129,000 followers. A podcast with Katy Perry as a host only reached 5,000 followers.