We have dangerously overestimated Joe Rogan’s influence

Attributing too much influence to Rogan absolves Spotify of its social responsibilities

An old school friend I met up with recently was astonished to find that not only did I host my own podcast but that I made a portion of my living from it too.

Talking over dinner, my friend – who has a very regular office job, as far removed from the media industry as you can imagine – seemed to envy my life as a freelance content creator subsisting off £5 monthly donations. He may have attained the monikers of middle-class success – a mortgage, a marriage and an Audi – but he found the prospect of having a podcast enticing, and the idea of being able to make a living by influencing people to be the real signifier of success.

It wasn’t long before I found out where these ideas had come from: his favourite podcast, and one of the world’s largest, The Joe Rogan Experience.

As one of the first podcasts to emerge in the late 2000s, Joe Rogan – already an American household name as the host of Fear Factor and a well-known commentator on the UFC circuit – has had over a decade to cultivate a loyal audience, using his everyman charm in interviews with guests ranging from stand-up comedians, fringe UFO conspiracy theorists and flat-earthers, to cultural icons such as the late Anthony Bourdain.

In 2021, when Spotify bought The Joe Rogan Experience for $100m – one of the biggest podcast acquisitions in history – it had close to 10 million listeners per episode.

In the past fortnight, however, Rogan has come in for heavy criticism for spreading anti-vaccination narratives and misinformation regarding Covid-19. This has resulted in artists such as Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and India Arie to remove their music from Spotify. Market reports suggest this has devalued Spotify by $2bn. The reaction to Rogan giving a platform to conspiracy theorists has also shaken some investors.

The internet is split on whether the podcast is putting people in danger or if it’s the last bastion of free speech. I would argue that neither of these positions is quite valid. Both overestimate how influential Joe Rogan actually is. A recent investigation by The Verge suggested that since Rogan signed the deal with Spotify, the rate of new followers, as well as the number of people who encounter his content, has significantly declined. The investigation also suggested that the number of Rogan’s dedicated listeners had declined by close to a third over the first year of the pandemic – potentially a result of people no longer commuting into work.

The extent of Rogan’s influence remains elusive – something that doesn’t just apply to him, but to anyone making content. While platforms like Apple and Spotify provide some insight into how many people listen or download episodes of a podcast, they provide very little insight into how people listen, what aspects of a podcast they pay attention to, whether they share the podcast, or who they share it with. Moreover, platforms like Spotify provide very little insight into how they define what a “listen” actually is, meaning that if someone were to listen to one of my podcasts, even for a matter of seconds, it would be logged as if they had listened to the entire hour.

If this sounds like a familiar story, it’s because it’s a standard practice by big tech companies. Between 2016 and 2018, Facebook, the biggest platform for publishing news, changed its algorithm to favour videos over text, incentivising news organisations to get rid of print journalists and replace them with video editors in order to better monetise their content. While Facebook promised that “pivoting” to video would make newsrooms more profitable and efficient, it was subsequently revealed that the company had actually been inflating video viewing figures in such a way that even scrolling past a video on a Facebook feed would classify as a “view”.

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This isn’t to say that Rogan, and other content creators who use their content to air hate speech and harmful misinformation, shouldn’t be widely condemned, or even penalised by the platforms they use. But attributing too much influence to Rogan isn’t only counterproductive, it also absolves Spotify of its social responsibilities by placing the blame on creators.

It is worth remembering that Spotify bought Rogan’s podcast knowing its long history of giving airtime to political extremists and conspiracy theorists. In paying millions for the show, Spotify signalled that not only were these views welcome, they were of an extremely high value too.

Indeed, if Rogan’s influence over politics and international public health strategy is now an existential threat, perhaps the ire is better directed at unaccountable tech platforms, which, in asserting their financial value and cultural relevance, give rise to such influencers.