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Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

The implication I see is that the $200M was not worth it.

I don't know their financials, but it seems quite unlikely that a single podcast would be worth that valuation.

Rogan was not making that much less on youtube. Keep in mind pre-spotify he was literally making NFL numbers for listeners+viewers per episode.

I don't think he's that popular anymore.

According to Google Trends, he was more popular in 2020 to early 2022 with some wild spike there, but it seems stabilised for now, at similar rates as in 2018.

Less reach with Spotify

The Joe Rogan Experience is at the top of Spotify’s U.S. podcast charts, and had the biggest weekly audience in the U.S. so far this year, and is widely estimated to bring in 11 million listeners per episode.

His show is the top podcast worldwide on Spotify each of the last three years — nearly double the second-place podcast, true crime series Crime Junkie, which has an estimated 5.9 million listeners per episode.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/brianbushard/2023/07/03/top-pod...

could it be that people that want to listen to his show use spotify for only listening to his show and a real podcast app to listen to regular podcasts? if i was inclined to listen to rogan that’s what i would do.

in your bubble

I personally think that he was better off pre-Spotify. Surely a bit of less money, but so does less drama. And Pre-Spotify he had the power to diversify himself in other platforms as well.

I think the drama would have come to him either way, the US has been extremely divided so he was ripe for cancellation when covid happened.

People have been saying the same thing about Howard Stern and his very large Sirius contract. And yet, SiriusXM keeps re-signing him.

Speculations

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