Joe Rogan Explains Why He No Longer Livestreams His Podcast

Every single minute, someone in the world decides to start a podcast. Okay, I just made up that fact. But as of March 2019, there were 700,000 podcasts available for listeners to choose from. That’s a stat for which I can actually cite a source to validate. Given the recent rise in the podcast market, the numbers will only continue to proliferate. However, from among this infinite sea of content for you to tune into on your commutes, the Joe Rogan Experience reigns supreme. 

Rogan has accumulated 7.38 million subscribers on YouTube, becoming the top-earning podcaster with a yearly salary of $30 million. In order to preserve these numbers, he’s gotta protect his content. During his recent conversation with comedian Jim Norton, Rogan revealed that he no longer livestreams his podcasts because other channels would steal his content and profit off it. “There were companies that were taking clips as we were live and uploading them immediately and building these huge channels with hundreds of thousands of subscribers,” he explains at the beginning of the episode. “You could use that for anything and they were selling things. They had links to stuff. They’re basically building a business off of your clips. You can’t let that happen because you also don’t know what they’re gonna turn that channel into.”

Aside from the theft issues, Rogan avoids livestreaming because he needs to revise his episodes to ensure he doesn’t infringe upon any of YouTube’s guidelines. “YouTube is still a little bit of a wild west situation,” he continues. “Then there were are also copyright issues – like you get three copyright flags in a row and they take your whole channel down. And we had gotten a bunch of them. We’ve gotten them for clips that we show, we’ve gotten them for pictures… you gotta figure out what you’re allowed to do and what you’re not allowed to do.”

In this episode with Norton, Rogan also addressed the recent controversy over Ari Shaffir’s jokes about Kobe Bryant’s death.