’Howard Stern Is Getting Ripped Off‘

Andrew Wilkinson, back in September:

In 2005, Howard Stern shocked the world by leaving terrestrial radio and accepting a $500 million dollar deal to move his show to Sirius satellite radio. In 2015, he renewed with a 5-year deal for $90 million per year.

People were blown away by the numbers. He was making out like a bandit! Had he been a CEO receiving the same pay, he would have qualified as the third highest paid CEO in America in 2014.

As of today, Howard is getting seriously ripped off.

Stern’s deal with Sirius XM expires at the end of the year.

And, presciently, regarding Joe Rogan:

Take a look at Joe Rogan, who currently has the most popular talk show podcast with over 200 million downloads per month. This number comes from Joe himself, but let’s assume he was exaggerating and it’s only 100 million downloads per month.

Assuming he sells ads at a low $18 CPM (cost per thousand listeners) and sells out his ad spots, he’s making approximately $64mm in annual revenue. If he’s on the higher end, at $50 CPM, he could be making as much as $240mm per year. The only factor that would change this is how many free ads Joe gives to companies that he has a personal equity stake in (like Onnit, the supplement brand he co-owns).

That means that Joe makes somewhere between $64-$240 million per year in revenue from his podcast advertising alone — and that’s handicapping his audience by half what he claims to have. That number also doesn’t include any additional revenue generated from his wildly popular YouTube channel, which has over 6 million subscribers.

$20 CPM is a fair ballpark estimate, and while we can’t verify his listener numbers, we know that his show ranks second at iTunes’s podcast directory. We don’t know yet what Spotify is paying him for exclusivity, but his show should have been generating $50+ million per year on its own. It seems likely that Joe Rogan is now the highest paid broadcaster in the world. Depending on the length of the deal, it really could be a billion dollar deal. Spotify’s stock jumped over 8 percent today on the news, which is over $2 billion at their current market cap.

However much Howard Stern was getting underpaid by Sirius six months ago, it’s even more so now.

★ Tuesday, 19 May 2020