Joe Rogan Will Lose Half His Audience*

*At least

I’m sure many of you heard the news that Joe Rogan is bringing his massively successful podcast to Spotify, and that it will be exclusive to that platform starting in 2021.

The rumor is that Rogan is receiving over $100 million for some number of years of Spotify-only distribution (2 or 3, it seems), but can leave and return to being independent at the end of the deal term.

A number of interesting blog posts have addressed the question of if this is a good deal for Rogan, but I’m more interested in just one question: how much is Rogan shrinking his audience by joining Spotify?

It seems that’s he’s agreed to pull his show from open RSS access by the end of the year (meaning it will disappear from Apple Podcasts and other 3rd-party podcast players), in addition to pulling the full episodes from YouTube (which drive over 1 million listens per episode at present).

So, time for some back of the envelope math.

Joe Rogan has approximately 10 million listeners per episode (he’s said he gets 190 million downloads per month, divided by about 20 episodes).

Assuming the breakdown of his listeners is similar to the market share of major podcast players, about 6 million of those come from Apple Podcasts, 1 million from top indies (Overcast, CastBox, PocketCasts, Podbean, Podcast Addict), 1 million from YouTube, and 2 million from “Other”, smaller players, including Stitcher, iHeartRadio, Google Podcasts, and Pandora.

Amazingly, Rogan is willing to give away all the users who are subscribed to his feed and start from 0. How many will follow him to Spotify? It depends on your estimate of the tradeoff between their love for Rogan and friction of switching podcast players. If we assume that 20% of his audience is “superfans”, who will follow him anywhere (generous in my view), we get to 2 million subscribers on Spotify.

How many of the remaining 8 million will switch? In consumer software, once a user builds a regular habit, such as using a particular podcast player, it’s typically hard to break, especially with the high “setup costs” of figuring out how to migrate a podcast subscription list and how to deal with a new interface for podcast playback. (Which, subjectively, is vastly inferior in the Spotify app to most other players. It’s clear they stuffed podcasts into a music player—it takes 4 concerted taps to start listening to a podcast, with the constant visual distraction of music you might be enjoying instead.) I’d be surprised if over 1 million of those 8 million “casual fans” would switch (12.5%) to Spotify to listen to Rogan.

So, generously, Rogan might be able to migrate 3 million current subscribers over to Spotify. But what about the dynamics of user churn and new user acquisition?

It’s hard to estimate user churn for a podcast without insider data, but it’s not unreasonable to assume 5-10% of the audience leaves every month, meaning that to achieve audience stability or growth, Rogan today adds 1 million new listeners per month (10% * 10 million). These 1 million new users are probably largely driven by discovery on Apple Podcasts (Rogan is a regular on the “top charts”), YouTube algorithmic referrals, and word of mouth. Once again, these new user sources will all go to zero.

How many new users per month can Spotify drive to Rogan? Given that Apple Podcasts sees about 65 million MAU globally, we can reason that Spotify has about 10 million monthly podcast listeners, based on podcast market share data (Apple at ~60%, Spotify at ~10%). If we assume that half of those are English speakers, Spotify has about 5 million users that it could plausibly drive towards Rogan (most of which, by the way, are not listening to him already, since they are using Spotify to listen to podcasts, where he is currently not available).

Even converting 5-10% of the entire Spotify podcast listener base to Rogan subscribers every month (a very high estimate, given the audience has not previously shown enough interest in his show to subscribe on other platforms), Spotify can possibly add 250K-500K subscribers to Rogan per month. And this number will diminish over time as they burn through the potential listeners that can be cross-promoted into his show.

At 250K new users per month, Rogan might begin losing audience each month (10% churn x 3 million = 300K lost per month, not offset by the 250K new), or gaining it very slowly. Potentially, based on liberal assumptions, he could grind his way slowly back up to 5 million subscribers. But I think this requires extremely generous conversion assumptions around new user discovery on Spotify and listener churn.

Oh, and at the end of 2-3 years, if he wants to leave Spotify, he’ll have to start this exercise all over again, from zero, back on the platforms that will have moved on from him (at best) or be outright hostile because of his departure (at worst).

He is never leaving Spotify. And it will be a long, long, long road back to 10 million listeners—the only way to escape the “gravity” of the math above is if the terms of the deal change (allowing him to remain on other platforms), or if Spotify podcast consumption grows massively.

Plausible, but I’d put the odds of him ever regaining his audience well under 50%.