At 21.3M subscribers, The Diary of a CEO just dethroned The Joe Rogan Experience as the most-subscribed podcast on the platform.
DOAC is on track to generate $60M in revenue this year, but Steven Bartlett isn’t trying to build the next Joe Rogan Experience. He's building the company that the next Joe Rogan would want to work with.
We spoke with Bartlett about how he got here, where podcasting is headed, and his plan to build the next major creator company:
Press Publish: You just passed Joe Rogan in YouTube subscribers. What does this milestone mean to you, and what do you think has been the biggest driver of your growth?
Steven Bartlett: It’s still unthinkable to me that I’m a podcaster at all, let alone that the show has this many subscribers. I had plenty of dreams growing up, and being a podcaster, or a creator of any kind, was never one of them.
The podcast started as a COVID passion project. I’d stepped down as CEO and sold some of my equity, and I asked myself a simple question: what would I do if money no longer mattered? The answer was podcasting. I’d tried it a few years earlier, been wildly inconsistent, but absolutely loved it. So in 2020, I took it to YouTube and committed to one episode a week, every week and that was just over 6 years ago.
If I had to name the biggest driver, it’s the most boring word in business: consistency and an obsessive focus on marginal improvements.
And as it relates to Joe Rogan, I, and many others owe Joe Rogan a huge debt. He and the other pioneers built the blueprint that so many of us, frankly, copied. Before him I don’t think anyone would have believed people would sit for three hours watching two people talk on YouTube in a messy, loosely produced, human way. Today more than a billion people watch podcasts on YouTube every month. Joe proved that demand existed.
PP: Looking back at the journey from launching DOAC to 21 million subscribers, what was the single biggest inflection point that changed the trajectory of the show?
SB: It’s funny, because there wasn’t really one inflection point. Our subscriber graph is a steady, compounding climb, and you’d struggle to point at the moment it turned.
The two ideas I talked to my team about on day one, and still talk about every single day, are 1% and experimentation. Most people are hunting for the big leap, the new platform, the breakthrough. We spend most of our time asking a much smaller question: how do we make this 1% better? Is this trailer 1% better than the last one? The maths is mind-blowing if you stick with it. Get 1% better every day for a year and you end up around 37 times better than where you started. Nobody notices the 1%. Everybody eventually notices the 37x.
The closest thing to a big leap in the last year has been translations. The show is now in more than 20 languages, and in over half of them people listen for longer than they do in English. But that took almost three years. For the first two we had absolutely no luck. We even tried it with Spotify and couldn’t get the retention we needed. Most teams would have killed the project. Ours kept going, and within the next year we expect 30 to 40 million people to be listening to the show in a language other than English.
So the whole team obsesses over the 1%, and our experimentation team takes the long bets that look like failures for years before they work.
PP: What’s one thing about building a successful video podcast that you believe most creators still misunderstand?
SB: I think a lot of creators still believe their job is to give people information. And for most of history that was a pretty good job, because information was hard to get.
That’s mostly over now. Intelligence is becoming abundant. If you want to know how many bugs live in your gut, you can ask a chatbot and it’ll tell you in two seconds. So if a scientist comes on my podcast and that’s all they give me, I’ve made a slower, longer version of something you could have got for free.
What the chatbot can’t tell you is what it was like for that scientist when their own gut health fell apart. How it changed their relationships, their work, what they thought they wanted from life. The chatbot has never lived through anything, so it has nothing to tell you there that you would trust.
Podcasting is a strange medium when you think about it. You spend hours with someone you’ve never met, which is much closer to sitting around a campfire than reading a textbook. And what you carry away from a campfire is a story—lived experience wrapped around information, not just information!
AI is making information almost free, and at the same time people seem to be getting lonelier and when something becomes abundant it gets cheap, and when something becomes scarce it gets valuable. For creators, that means the thing worth tripling down on is whatever makes the person watching feel heard, seen, understood, less alone and connected. It’s the human stuff.
When I think about my favourite podcasts, yes, they teach me things, and yes, they entertain me. But the reason I keep coming back is that they make me feel connected. That’s the irreplaceably human part, and I don’t see any AI taking it.
PP: You’ve said DOAC is on track to generate $60 million in revenue this year. What’s been the biggest unlock in turning a podcast into a business of that scale? What still operates the same as it did on day one?
SB: None of this would exist if we hadn’t built our own team in-house to commercialise the show.
If I’d taken one of the big minimum-guarantee deals I had been offered, and that so many creators take, I’d arguably be running five times more adverts, many of them for brands I don’t believe in. I’d probably have had to pull the show off YouTube and put it on Netflix or somewhere else. And I’d have lost the long-term partnerships that go far beyond selling just podcast ad inventory, the ones that have made me an investor, a board member or part of the team at companies I love.
When I use an outside partner, like an agent, the deal is non-exclusive, so my team keeps full freedom to do anything in-house.
If I had to sum it up in one word, it’s sovereignty. In two, incentive alignment.
When creators get big, the fragmentation vultures arrive. An agent here, a publisher there, an events promoter, someone selling your ads, someone doing your production. Ten partners, ten sets of incentives, and almost none of them point at what’s best for your audience. That’s the problem from first principles: you can’t serve an audience well when everyone around you is paid to want something different.
So we do everything in-house: production, data science, commercial and brand partnerships, events, even our own speaking bureau.
Through Steven.com we now offer that same model to the creators we’ve signed, essentially an incentive-aligned co-founder who builds the business with them for the long term. The creator is our customer. That’s why I think Steven.com wins.
PP: With everyone from independent creators to Hollywood celebrities launching podcasts, where do you think the podcast industry is headed? Are we approaching oversaturation, or is the opportunity still expanding? What does a creator starting a podcast tomorrow need to understand?
SB: In 2017, when I started the podcast as an experiment in my office, everyone was obsessed with short video. Facebook Watch had just launched and was paying creators for one- and two-minute clips. Podcasting was the opposite. It was long and deep, and it lived on an RSS feed, meaning you publish once and Spotify, Apple and everyone else pulls it in, so no single algorithm owns you. Most depth, least algorithm dependency. It was a hedge against the direction of travel.
I’m asking the same question now. What’s the hedge against today’s direction of travel? The force reshaping everything is AI. A kid in Mumbai or Manhattan can now both make video, images and text for close to nothing, and the slop has already arrived.
Before ChatGPT, around 5% of new articles on the web were mainly AI-written. By late 2024 it was over half. Video is next.
So what’s the opposite of slop? For me it’s content that’s hard, scarce and valuable.
Hard means difficult to make. Nine-camera podcasts. Daily vlogs with a team editing every day. Livestreaming yourself for seven hours a day. You can’t prompt your way into that, so very few people will compete with you.
Scarce means that even if you were willing to do the hard thing, you couldn’t get the access. When we interviewed President Zelensky, I don’t think he’d done another long-form podcast in the past year. Getting the conversation was the scarce part. Flying 20 people to Brussels, finding two local live interpreters at a moment’s notice and translating the episode into 25 languages within a couple of hours was the hard part.
And lastly it needs to be valuable. Because you can do something hard and scarce that nobody finds value in. Value comes in many forms, humour, entertainment, information and so on. But what people will always and increasingly value in a world of AI is the irreplaceably human.
We aren’t evolving out of our need for connection, and we’re lonelier than ever. As AI floods the supply of everything else, the supply of content that makes you feel seen and understood will fall, and the demand for it will rise.
So is podcasting oversaturated? If it’s not hard, scarce and valuable/human then yes.
But the hard, scarce, human kind has more room than ever.
That’s why our tagline at Steven.com is “Accelerating the journey back to human.” I’m trying to make The Diary Of A CEO more human in every part of the content.
My big bet is that we’re heading back into the era of the vlog, except this time they’ll look more like documentaries. And when you look at history, I don’t think it’s a strange bet.
Humans have always been obsessed with watching other people’s real lives. The anthropologist Robin Dunbar argues that language may have evolved partly so we could gossip, so we could keep track of who was doing what in the tribe. At Versailles, courtiers used to crowd into Louis XIV’s bedroom every morning just to watch him wake up and get dressed. And in the early 70s around ten million Americans tuned in each week to watch an ordinary family in California, the Louds, arguing on PBS. Then we spent fourteen years keeping up with the Kardashians.
The technology keeps changing. The tribe became the royal court, the court became the television, and the television became the phone in your pocket. But what we’re hungry for hasn’t changed since we were sitting around fires. We want to see how other people live, so we can work out how to live ourselves.
That’s why reality TV is still thriving even as TV itself struggles. The medium is dying and the appetite is completely intact. And in a world filling with AI slop, I think that appetite only gets bigger, because real life is the one thing you can’t generate on ChatGPT. So next we’ll be keeping up with the creators, and that hunger is coming back to YouTube in a big way!
We’re entering the era of the Human Documentaries.
In a world of AI, Podcasting is going to become…Lifecasting.
PP: You’re building Steven.com into something bigger than DOAC. What’s the ultimate ambition for the company, and what should we expect next?
SB: I want creators to have a better option than signing with 12 fragmentation vultures who all have misaligned short-term incentives. Every one of those deals forces a creator to compromise on something that matters to them or their audience.
Every time I see a big creator take a huge minimum guarantee and move their audience off YouTube or Spotify, my heart breaks a little. They didn’t have a real alternative that let them do right by their audience and still earn what they deserve.
I believe you can do both. You can play long, work only with brands you’re aligned with, reach your full commercial potential and stay on the platforms where your audience already is. You can own the relationship with your audience instead of renting it from a social network every day, and own the data, so the insight comes to you instead of a tour promoter or a streamer.
Additionally, for 15 years creators have done this insecure dance with algorithms while their organic reach kept falling. We don’t have to play that game anymore.
Right now most creators I meet have two choices. Sign 12 deals with 12 outside partners pulling in 12 directions, all collecting your audience’s data, or struggle alone.
Steven.com is the third option—in my biased view—the better option. We become your co-founder, build your business in-house with aligned incentives, and plan on a 20 or 30 year time horizon.
Steven.com will be the definitive company in the creator economy. I have no doubt about that. It was born in this industry, it understands it from the inside, and it’s built to serve creators better than anyone. The 100-year-old companies trying to pivot into this world will always feel and behave like tourists.
PP: There’s a sentiment around growing creators and businesses that the team you lay the foundation with are rarely the ones who take you to the next level. Has that been true for you, and how has what you look for in talent changed as the show and your vision for the company have grown?
SB: The team I started with around my kitchen table in London six years ago built everything the show is now, and many of them are still here.
What’s mattered even more is the culture we set, which has never left: our obsession with detail, experimentation and ambition, and something we call pushing on paper walls, the belief that most constraints are made of paper even though from a distance they look solid. A company can change almost everything as it grows but I think those founding principles underneath should stay put.
What we look for has evolved. With AI agents arriving, we hire for incredible taste, entrepreneurship, high agency and what we call lean-in people, the ones who run towards change (My God, is the world changing fast). But kindness, hard work and a growth mindset haven’t moved. Those were the values at that kitchen table, and they’re the values of the 150 people across the business today.
The shape has changed though. Like a lot of creator businesses, including Jimmy’s Beast Holdings, our org chart now looks more like a Fortune 500 company than a “podcast.” We have an eight-person C-suite of world-class media executives, and what started as a passion project now runs like a large enterprise.
I couldn't be more grateful to the early Diary Of A CEO gang. They are truly exceptional and came on the ride of a lifetime with me and continue to do so. Dare I say, I think they’ll be the PayPal mafia of the creator economy Someday - they’ll all go on to build great creator economy companies.
