Is Joe Rogan a Podcast Unicorn?

His YouTube channel has more than 7,000,000 subscribers, and his podcast has more than 1,400 episodes under its belt. A phenomenon unto himself, Joe Rogan is the “elephant in the room” of podcasting.

Make no mistake, The Joe Rogan Experience has a huge audience. In our Canadian Podcast Listener 2019 study, one-in-ten podcast listeners said they listened to the podcast in the past month. That’s more than three times the audience of the #2 show, Stuff You Should Know.  The Joe Rogan Experience had more mentions among Canadian podcast listeners than the combined podcasts of any publisher except the CBC. So naturally, we wonder what’s so different about Joe Rogan?

A Video-Native Podcast

One of the things that makes The Joe Rogan Experience stand out from most podcasts is that it lives in both video and audio, starting on Ustream in 2009 then moving to YouTube in 2013. That video legacy shines through in the Canadian Podcast Listener results. Even though listeners qualify for our study by saying they listen to podcasts defined as “digital audio programs that you can subscribe to in a feed and either download to listen to later, or stream on demand,” many say they access podcasts on YouTube. This is especially true when it comes to The Joe Rogan Experience—52% of past-month listeners to the podcast say they use YouTube as their primary source of podcasts.

An Everyman Audience

Joe Rogan’s audience is also unique from other podcasts, in the ways that it isn’t different from the overall population. Advertisers see podcasts as an attractive advertising medium partly because of the profile of the average podcast listener; they tend to be younger and more affluent than the average Canadian. Monthly podcast listeners also index 33% higher than the adult population for having a university education. Joe Rogan’s audience, on the other hand, falls right in line with the national average.

Looking at the Canadian Podcast Chart, we can see the relative penetration of various demos for The Joe Rogan Experience compared to the other top 10 podcasts in Canada. (Charts not to same scale)

Clearly The Joe Rogan Experience reaches a younger, male podcast audience, but it’s the education breakouts that really set it apart from the typical podcast.  While most podcasts are super-serving a well-educated audience, Joe Rogan is catering to the everyman.

Joe Rogan is a unicorn when it comes to podcasts, at least as we think of the medium now. Although his YouTube views mean that much of his audience is inaccessible to a podcast marketplace based on audio downloads, his podcast is a multi-media success story. He reaches a large and broad audience, distinct from the typically urbane podcast listener. Could Joe Rogan, like a lot of other unicorns, point to future opportunities? Will there be more Joe Rogans or similar mass appeal shows as podcasting goes mainstream? To use a television analogy, Sherlock may be a great show, but it isn’t for everyone. There’s a lot of people who just want Fear Factor.

The Canadian Podcast Listener Study 2019—including the Canadian Podcast Chart—is co-published by Signal Hill Insights and Ulster Media, with support from The Podcast Exchange (TPX). Results are based on online surveys using a market representative sample of more than 4,500 Canadian adults from Maru Voice Canada. A free summary report of top-line findings from this year’s study is available here.