How Joe Rogan Won Podcasting
If you’re even slightly interested in podcasting, you would have heard of Joe Rogan and his infamous show The Joe Rogan Experience.
Joe (we’re not of first name terms — yet — but I can’t use his full name through this whole blog) has the biggest show on the planet and he just licensed the rights to that show exclusively to Spotify.
“So what?’, you might be thinking, what’s the big deal…?
The deal is worth a reported £82 Million aka $100 Million. Yep, as I said in the title, Joe Rogan has won at podcasting.
If you’re asking yourself ‘wow, how many downloads does he get to make it worth that much?’ the answer is roughly 190,000,000 downloads a month.
As it states on his official website ‘The Joe Rogan Experience podcast is a long form conversation hosted by comedian Joe Rogan with friends and guests that have included comedians, actors, musicians, MMA fighters, authors, artists, and beyond.’
And when he says long-form content he means it; Joe’s shows run from around 90 minutes up to over 4 hours.
And I am going to chuck it out there right now, they’re great! Seriously, go and take a listen when you next have between 1.5 and 4 hours spare!
He’s hosted everyone from Elon Musk to Kevin Hart, Mike Tyson to Lance Armstrong and he asks them anything he wants to know, literally anything. No holds barred interviewing by a guy who has a razor sharp brain and a killer wit.
So that’s enough fan-boy info about Joe and his mega show; why is the world talking about this deal with Spotify?
Because at the moment, he’s not even on the platform.
That’s right — the majority of listening to his podcast happens via Apple (who have stated that he has the biggest show on the planet) and a huge amount of his audience view his show on YouTube too.
Now, don’t get me wrong — Rogan moving to Spotify won’t be the death of Apple or YouTube but — if he manages to migrate his audience successfully — he is taking a lot of valuable people with him.
Here’s how he currently stakes up on the existing platforms
Apple: 190,000,000 downloads | 153,000 Reviews | 4.3* Rating
Youtube: 2.1 billion views | 8.42 Million Subs
And it is not just the sheer scale of the numbers that makes Joe’s audience valuable for platforms.
They will be — as podcast audiences are in general — an ABC1 Demographic, educated, affluent and content hungry. So they’re an advertisers dream… hence why he can talk about Butcher Box for 8 minutes and still have people tuning in!
Given that Joe has been making his podcast for 11 years (before Spotify even existed) it in unlikely that he ever — at the outset — thought “If I hold back the content from certain platforms they will come and buy me eventually”, but I think not being on Spotify, up until now, has definitely driven the price and value of this deal up.
Whoever on his team decided not to go on to Spotify when it started to make waves is about to get a nice pay day!!
It is estimated that Apple currently enjoys 45% marketshare in the podcasting space right now as opposed to Spotify’s 20%, but the Rogan switch could close the gap quickly.
They are doing the move in a two parts: On 1st Sept Joe Rogan’s show (yes, all 1476 episodes) will be available on Spotify and from December it will be exclusively on Spotify. It has not been confirmed if that means they’ll strip the existing content from the existing platforms, but for 82 million quid that could well be the case.
Another interesting part of this is that Spotify have stated that they will be hosting the video version of the podcast exclusively too, so — moving forwards — it will only be clips on YouTube.
Don’t think that all the upside is on the part of Joe and his team either. With the announcement on Wednesday Spotify’s stock price jumped up 15% to $183 according to IG Markets.
While the whole world seems to have gone a bit nuts about this deal (which makes sense as it is the first of it’s kind, at this scale) the economics from the streaming giants side seems to make a lot of sense.
Let’s say that Joe can only get 20% of his existing audience to come across to his new home, that’s 38,000,000 downloads a month. Let’s then say that only 20% of those downloads drive new active users to sign up for the service, that’s 7,6000,000 and lets finally say that only 20% of those active users become premium Spotify customers that’s 1,520,000 people. At £9.99 per month that is £15,184,800 in monthly revenues, so it is only going to take 6.5 months for Spotify to recoup their investment… and that’s before you consider what the elevated brand awareness and PR value of the media storm around this deal has created!
There is definitely a mixed opinion about this deal. Half the people are patting Joe on the back and saying “nice one Joe, you have been smashing the self-produced’ content game for 11 years, good for you”, while the other half are saying “he has sold out”.
Whichever your stance on this, there are some great lessons for podcasters:
1. Make the show you want to make — it will find an audience.
2. Understand that long-term big wins take a long time to come to fruition
3. You have some much control of your destiny if you own the copyright
4. Get started now, stay consistent and do what feels right
Gary Vee made the term ‘attention is the new currency’ popular a few years ago and, wow, he was right again.
I have personally been banging on about the power of podcasting for 3 years — it is something I drill into the dozens of coaches, PTs, experts, investors, influencers etc. that I have coached — and this deal has beautifully highlighted it.
If you’ve been toying with the idea of launching and wonder ‘when is the best time to start’, the answer is YESTERDAY. It costs you literally nothing to start a podcast and it could make you $100,000,000*
Joe, if you you read this, fair play, I salute you. You’ve been changing the audio game for a long time and with this deal you have done it again.
Here’s Spotify’s Official Announcement: PRESS RELEASE
Here is what Joe had to say: JOE ROGAN ANNOUNCEMENT
*You might not make £100,000,000 unless you’re really, really, really, really really good.
