Google searches for ‘Joe Rogan’ dropped 40% since moving exclusively to Spotify
Image Credit: Digital Music News
Digital Music News suggests moving The Joe Rogan Experience exclusively to Spotify has lead to a 40% drop in Google searches.
Since Spotify bought exclusive rights to Joe Rogan’s hugely popular podcast for a reported $100 million in May last year, the streaming platform are yet to publish any subscriber numbers, making it impossible to determine if followers have changed since the transition. Music industry news site Digital Music News published a Google Trends graph showing interest in the search term ‘Joe Rogan’ over the past year, pointing out significant spikes in the data such as starting to record for Spotify on September 1st and going exclusively to Spotify on December 1st.
DMN calculated in the six months leading up to December 1st, Google Trends hit an average of score of 57.9. Then after the week of December 1st and during 2021, this score dropped to an average of 34.6, representing a decline of 40.2% in search volume. Search results for terms such as ‘Joe Rogan podcast’ and ‘Joe Rogan MMA’ showed similar results. Digital Music News suggests Joe Rogan may be losing relevancy since his exclusive deal with Spotify, however it should be pointed out, this 40% drop is off the back of a publicly very busy 2020, first announcing the deal May 19th last year (you’ll see this spike on the left side of the graph above). Equally, declining Google Trends results of course do not confirm a drop in follower numbers on Spotify.
That being said, the removal of the podcast host’s videos from YouTube could well be leading to less Google traffic. The videos are now on Spotify, but the music streaming service has never been a video first platform and lacks key features such as comments. Rogan has discussed the video situation, saying:
It’s not as smooth as it probably should have been when we first transitioned over in December, but [Spotify] just wasn’t ready for the volume. They had never had a show — first of all, they created video because of the conversation we had about this podcast. They wanted the podcast to be audio-only, and my manager was like, ‘think about the Elon Musk moment when Elon Musk was smoking weed.’ That is a viral moment that only happens with video.
Joe Rogan
Later mentioning comments on videos on Spotify:
That’s where YouTube shines over all over forums, is that they have that comments section, and I think Spotify needs to recognize that. And I’ve tried to talk to them about that, and there’s been some discussion about putting comments — but one of the things they said is, ‘if we put comments on one podcast, we have to put them on all podcasts.’ But I go, ‘why? Just put them on mine, just put them on mine.
Joe Rogan