He gets 90.000.000+ downloads per month at times, I read.
90
million?! I'm pretty sure there aren't 90 million English speaking podcast listeners in the world.
Edison Research says 42 million Americans listen to a podcast weekly, and 67 million monthly. I don't know how to extrapolate that out to the entire world, as far as English speaking goes, but 90 million downloads of any podcast is not realistic.
Look at it this way: NPR has the biggest monthly podcast audience. A little over 16 million downloads. And that is spread across 41 different podcasts. The most popular podcasts can get in the 10 million range of downloads, but that is a very, very small number of shows. The next tier, where Rogan lives (
he ranks 17th overall), will get over a million downloads, maybe two, but not always consistently.
You can't judge downloads by those YouTube view numbers, either. Everyone who watches 2 seconds of that video counts in that number.
One of my podcasts on YouTube has 4,469 "views," but the stats for that episode show that the total watch time is 17,884 minutes. So the math tells us most of those views only last a few minutes.
I don't disagree about the potential of podcasting in general (obviously), but in 5 or 10 years the landscape will likely be different. Right now it's (almost) as easy for me to get a listen as it is for Joe Rogan or Marc Maron. Eventually though, that will change. Everything on the Internet starts that way, democratic, then money comes in and things normalize. Meaning the rich get richer and it becomes increasingly difficult to break in to that top tier without a lot of money behind you.
Billy Corgan, Russell Brand, Henry Rollins and people like this would probably not stop by at MY podcast, or yours.
And that is only going to become more and more true as podcasting becomes a
professional thing.
no censorship (so far), 100% free expression...
For what it's worth, if you have advertisers, you almost never have "100% free expression."