Spotify quietly began testing a new tool that publicly shows how many followers popular podcasts have.
News of the tool, which is currently unnamed, was broken by Bloomberg on March 21. According to the outlet, the new followers feature appears on the landing page of podcasts in the Spotify mobile app as a tiny rectangle to the left of the app.
As a result of the tool, the following size of numerous podcasts are now viewable on the app.
One of the most startling revelations is the scale of “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast. According to this tool, Rogan’s show has an astonishing 14.5 million followers. As Bloomberg noted, the second most-followed podcast, “TED Talks Daily,” has less than five million followers.
But while the metric is undoubtedly useful, we should take this tool with a pinch of salt, as a spokesperson for Spotify noted how a show’s following isn’t the only indicator of a podcast’s success.
Bloomberg, for instance, noted how politics podcast Chapo Trap House rakes in $175,900 per month through donations despite only having 127,000 Spotify followers.
“This number represents the number of users who have decided to ‘follow’ a show on Spotify — it doesn’t represent a show’s total audience or the performance of an episode,” Spotify said in a comment to Bloomberg. “The early feedback from both creators and users has been encouraging.”
Further reading:
