Podcasters, Like Joe Rogan, Are The (New) Media & This Changes Everything!
There is a trend emerging, and it’s been happening for some time. It’s become increasingly clear that people, and more specifically podcasters, with an outsized following on social media of thousands, or millions, are now the new media, or what I like to call, ‘a media of one’.
Take, for instance, President Elect Donald Trump’s successful election campaign last year. One of the things he did was reach out to leading podcasters like Joe Rogan, who has a following of around 20M subscribers in the US to have a couple of long and in-depth podcast sessions. What is intriguing is that Joe Rogan’s podcast audience is largely composed of young American men who have been credited with tipping the voting balance in Donald Trump’s favour.
More recently, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s Founder and CEO who has Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp as leading global social media platforms, also went to have a 3-hour podcast session with Joe Rogan to make his case for increasingly controversial changes for his social media platforms earlier this week. There is definitely a trend emerging!
Leading global personalities are gravitating towards podcasters as a more influential and accommodating form of media to tell their stories from their own unique and sometimes controversial perspectives with no filters — damn the consequences! This is quite unlike the traditional and fast decaying media industrial complex that seems to be heading to irrelevance globally who would generally steer such conversations to suit their own not so hidden agendas.
Traditional media entities, whilst still relevant, simply don’t have the cachet of a well-oiled and greased podcaster, the likes of Joe Rogan, who has the global ‘manosphere’ at his finger tips, as well as his beck and call, should he need them for any reason. This is real influence at scale, the likes of which traditional media players no longer wield in the modern and digital-first consumer context, fueled by ever present social media in the attention economy. This epic and fast growing paradigm is seemingly giving no quarter to the incumbent media class at scale and portends a daunting future for them,
The reality is that a decent podcaster needs nothing more than a small room where they can host their guests with a few microphones and headphones, standard off-the-shelf DSLR cameras, or even decent smartphones on tripods, plus some video production talent to shoot and post-produce the episodes, and they are off to the races! It’s not rocket science if you do the number crunching to see that its far more cost-effective and efficient compared to how a typical TV or Radio media broadcaster operates.
Indeed, even in Kenya, podcasting studios are popping up everywhere where you can book hourly sessions for audio and/or video podcasts for very affordable prices, including post-production, to create your very own personalized flavour of ‘Oprah-esque’ podcasts. Actually, unless I am mistaken, it almost feels like everyone, and their grandchildren, have launched a podcast during the past year. Podcasts are fast becoming the ultimate personal digital branding ‘flex’ these days, even in Kenya :)
Going forward, what remains to be seen is whether mega podcasters like Joe Rogan have the ability to fully supplant certain quarters of the old media industrial complex at scale, if they have’nt already done so? Is this be a passing fad, or are podcasters who wield more reach and influence than traditional media players only going to become more ubiquitous from this point onwards? Whatever the case, one thing one is clear, the trend of ‘the media of one’ as seen with leading podcasters like Joe Rogan is definitely making a massive dent on traditional media as we know it.
