'The Diary of a CEO' Passes Joe Rogan in Subscribers on YouTube's Podcast Chart

The Diary of a CEO, the interview podcast hosted by British entrepreneur Steven Bartlett, now has more YouTube subscribers than any other show on YouTube's U.S. Top 100 podcast chart, edging past The Joe Rogan Experience, according to an announcement released Monday, Nov. 2, by FlightStory, the company that produces the show. The milestone was reported the same day by Podnews, Net Influencer and Podcast News Daily.

According to the FlightStory release, The Diary of a CEO had 21.3 million YouTube subscribers on Sunday, Nov. 1, compared with 21.2 million for The Joe Rogan Experience. The company said it checked YouTube's public subscriber counts at 13:40 GMT that day for every show on the chart. YouTube rounds public counts to three significant figures, so the displayed gap between the two channels is about 100,000 subscribers, Net Influencer noted. Podcast News Daily reported the show's count as 21.4 million.

How the ranking was measured

The comparison is FlightStory's own analysis rather than an official YouTube ranking. YouTube's weekly podcast chart, which the company launched on May 15, 2025, ranks shows by watch time, not subscribers. YouTube said the chart is updated every Wednesday and generally includes playlists designated as "podcasts" by creators, excluding playlists that contain only clips or Shorts. In that announcement, YouTube said podcasts on the platform have more than 1 billion monthly active viewers.

FlightStory said the channel grew from about 14.2 million subscribers on Dec. 29, 2025, based on an Internet Archive capture, to 21.3 million on Nov. 1, an increase of about 7.1 million, or roughly 50%. Podcast News Daily noted that YouTube subscriber counts are not the same as podcast downloads or audience consumption.

Views, episodes and translated audio

The release said the channel published 87 full-length video episodes between Jan. 1 and Oct. 31, 2026, and recorded more than 1 billion YouTube views between Jan. 1 and Oct. 30, compared with about 399 million in the first ten months of 2025, citing FlightStory's YouTube Studio data.

FlightStory attributed much of the growth to international audiences. The company said 260.8 million of 1.12 billion YouTube views from Jan. 1 to Oct. 31, or 23.3%, came on audio tracks in languages other than English, led by Spanish, Russian, German, Portuguese and French. Net Influencer pointed out that the release gives a separate channel total of 1.03 billion views, including Shorts, for a slightly different period, and that FlightStory did not explain the gap between the two figures.

The company cited the Oct. 22 episode with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as an example. FlightStory said the conversation was recorded in Ukrainian with two human interpreters and later made available in more than 20 languages using artificial intelligence voice technology, and that it passed 7 million views in 10 days.

"Strategically, translating every episode of the show into more than 20+ languages has been an incredible unlock and allows us to reach the rest of the world," Bartlett said in the release.

Bartlett on the milestone

The show began in 2017 as a personal audio diary about Bartlett's experience building a business, and it started publishing full video episodes weekly on YouTube in 2020, according to the release. "When I started The Diary Of A CEO, I was sitting in my bedroom in Manchester, recording into a microphone. About 40 people listened to those first episodes. It's quite difficult to comprehend where it's got to today," Bartlett said.

In an interview with the newsletter Press Publish, Bartlett credited Rogan's influence on the format. "I, and many others owe Joe Rogan a huge debt," he said, adding that Rogan and other pioneers "built the blueprint that so many of us, frankly, copied." The newsletter reported that the show is on track to generate $60 million in revenue this year. Bartlett also told the publication that within the next year the team expects "30 to 40 million people to be listening to the show in a language other than English."

Other rankings and recent developments

FlightStory also pointed to outside rankings. Podscribe ranked the show first by estimated average downloads and views per episode in March 2026 and July 2026, at about 3.3 million and 4.4 million respectively, and the show placed second in Spotify's global Top Podcasts list for 2025. Net Influencer noted that Rogan's show held the top spot in that Spotify list and that Forbes ranked Rogan the highest-paid podcaster of 2026 at an estimated $82 million.

The milestone follows the September launch of OBSN, a creator venture between Bartlett's holding company, Steven.com, and Authentic Brands Group. In the Authentic announcement, Bartlett said, "We are aiming to deploy up to $400m in creator businesses over the coming years," as Variety also reported.

The show has also described changes to its editorial process. Executive producer Hans Sahni told Business Insider in a report published Oct. 30 that the show had raised its accuracy standards after a BBC investigation in late 2024 found it had shared harmful health misinformation. "We're being more rigorous than we have in the past," Sahni said. He said an independent medical Ph.D. researcher had fact-checked 71 episodes, about 13% of the 540 long-form interviews in the show's YouTube catalog.

The Diary of a CEO is available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and other major podcast platforms, according to FlightStory.