How Joe Rogan Became a Company Worth $100 Million Dollars
Credit: 9to5Mac
My father was a kitchen supply salesman in New York City. Growing up, I would sometimes go into work with my father. We'd take the Long Island Railroad from Hicksville Train Station at 5:22 AM and arrive at Penn Station at 6:10 AM. We would then hop on the E or C train and get off at Canal Street. My father and I would then walk to his office in Chinatown. Finally, we'd arrive at his office and work would begin at around 7 AM.
Before, my father started working, he'd set me up to work. My job was to sell retail kitchen supplies on the street. We'd set up a table and he'd provide me with forks, knives, spoons and a random assortment of other kitchen supplies. The first time I did this, my father gave me a piece of advice, "People buy from people, not companies."
When Spotify paid Joe Rogan $100MM to exclusively air on Spotify, I couldn't help, but laugh and think of my father. Is Spotify buying a person or a company?
Joe Rogan - The Company
Joe Rogan runs a podcast called The Joe Rogan Experience. 190 million people download it a month. Imagine The Joe Rogan Experience is a country. It would rank eighth on the most populous countries list — ahead of Bangladesh (population 160M) and behind Brazil (population 211M).
That's not all. Joe Rogan has 6.4M followers on Twitter and 10.4M followers on Instagram. He's expected to bring in between $30MM to $64MM in revenue in 2020.
What I like most about Joe Rogan, the company, is the defensibility. Nobody can copy his business model.
As Mario Gabriele writes in "Will Joe Rogan IPO?":
“In a post-scarcity world in which information can be sent and modified at zero cost, other characteristics begin to take on outsize value. In his essay, ‘Better than Free,’ Wired founder Kevin Kelly describes the internet as a copy machine, noting that to build something valuable, ‘You need to sell things which can not be copied.’”
People listen to Joe Rogan because he is Joe Rogan. And there are only two reasons people would stop listening:
Joe Rogan dies
Joe Rogan is cancelled
He's 52 and he seems to be immune to being cancelled. Joe Rogan might have been born a person, but he's evolved into a multi-national corporation. It’s not just him.
Riches in the Niches
One of my favorite people to follow on Twitter is Sam Parr, CEO of the Hustle. A few weeks ago, Sam tweeted about a business called The Van Trump Report.
Unless you are an investor in the agriculture space, you probably aren't familiar with the business. The Van Trump Report is run by Kevin Van Trump. Kevin describes it as a daily newsletter helping investors and Ag professionals better execute by making more informed decisions.
Seems straightforward, but here's the crazy part — the business makes $30MM a year. As someone smart once said, "there are riches in the niches".
Kevin isn't the only business like that. Stratechery, a tech newsletter founded by Ben Thompson, is estimated to make 7 figures in revenue a year.
These businesses, though considerably smaller, than Joe Rogan, are similar. They are personality-driven, hard to copy, and have achieved scale through the internet.
But why is this possible?
Horizontal to Vertical Media
In the past few years, we've seen a shift in the online media landscape. The name of the game was to get as large of an audience as possible. Companies like Buzzfeed would leverage social and get as many clicks as possible. The theory was the larger the audience, the more money you make. 14 years later, Buzzfeed isn't profitable.
People began to realize that the "riches were in the niches". Vertical media businesses were that niche. Build a niche media business focused on a small audience. For example:
Van Trump Report — Agriculture Investors
Joe Rogan Experience — Libertarian leaning men between 18-55
Stratechery — Technology Investors
There is a specific group of people who would consume the content above. It wasn't content for anyone. And this type of content is becoming easier to create and monetize.
The Tools for The One Person Media Company
On September 3rd, 1995, Pierre Omidyar, sold a broken laser pointer on eBay for $14.83. The buyer paid via check. In 1998, three people started a company called PayPal. It allowed sellers on eBay to accept payments online. In 2019, 712 billion dollars of payments were processed on PayPal. PayPal changed the world for internet companies.
Now a new generation of tools are leading the way.
Tools like Substack, OnlyFans and Cameo are making content creation and monetization easier than ever.
Take Substack. Substack describes itself as an online platform that provides publishing, payment, analytics, and design infrastructure to support subscription newsletters. Before Substack, newsletters subscriptions were challenging:
Create a website
Choose a payment processor
Integrate payment processor
Choose a newsletter service
Design the newsletter
Set up analytics
Substack takes care of all this. You just make an account and start writing.
The internet is enabling the next generation of content creators. People are becoming media companies. Niches are helping them build an audience. The tools are making it easier to create and monetize their audience. So, is Spotify buying Joe Rogan, the person, or Joe Rogan, the company?
This post was inspired by my conversation with Dave Nemetz, Founder of Bleacher Report. Watch our conversation on YouTube. Listen to our conversation on iTunes.