Steven Bartlett’s The Diary of a CEO now has more YouTube subscribers than The Joe Rogan Experience. Its producer, FlightStory, announced on Monday 2 November that the British entrepreneur’s show had 21.3 million subscribers the day before, against 21.2 million for Rogan, which FlightStory says makes it the most-subscribed show in YouTube’s US Top 100 podcast chart.
We checked both channels ourselves on Monday 9 November. YouTube showed 21.8 million for The Diary of a CEO and 21.2 million for Rogan’s channel, PowerfulJRE, so the lead has grown in the week since the announcement.
Nothing changes in your podcast app. The show is still in every major podcast app, with full episodes on Mondays and Thursdays and a Most Replayed Moment on Fridays. Today’s guest is the comedian Katt Williams.
How Bartlett and Rogan compare
| Measure | The Diary of a CEO | The Joe Rogan Experience |
|---|---|---|
| YouTube subscribers on 1 November (FlightStory’s count) | 21.3 million | 21.2 million |
| YouTube subscribers on 9 November (our check) | 21.8 million | 21.2 million |
| Monthly audio listeners in October (Podscribe estimate) | 4.6 million | 4.7 million |
| Position in our Top 100 today | No. 21 | No. 18 |
Some caution about the first row. The comparison is FlightStory’s own, and it makes the show. It covers the shows in YouTube’s Top 100 podcast chart for the US, and it uses the public subscriber counts that YouTube rounds to three significant figures, read at 13:40 GMT on 1 November. On rounded numbers that close, the real lead that day could have been tiny. Eight days later it is about 600,000.
Subscribers are also a different thing from listeners. In audio alone Rogan is still slightly ahead: Podscribe’s October ranking puts him fifth for audio reach and Bartlett seventh. Add YouTube views to downloads and the picture flips. The Diary of a CEO was Podscribe’s second-biggest show in October with 48.1 million plays, behind only The MeidasTouch Podcast, and roughly four in five of those plays were on YouTube. On our own Top 100, Rogan is three places above Bartlett today.
Seven million new subscribers since December
The channel had about 14.2 million subscribers at the end of December 2025, so it has grown by roughly half in ten months. FlightStory says it published 87 full-length video episodes between 1 January and 31 October and recorded more than one billion YouTube views by 30 October, against about 399 million in the first ten months of 2025.
Bartlett points to translation. Episodes now go out in more than 20 languages, and FlightStory says about 261 million of this year’s views, nearly a quarter, were on audio tracks other than English, led by Spanish, Russian, German, Portuguese and French. Bartlett calls it “an incredible unlock”. His interview with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, released on 22 October, was recorded in Ukrainian with two interpreters and then dubbed with AI voice technology. FlightStory says it passed seven million views in ten days.
We think the dubbing is the part of this that other big shows will copy. The Diary of a CEO began in 2017 as an audio diary that Bartlett recorded in his bedroom in Manchester for about 40 listeners, and it only became a weekly video show in 2020.
FlightStory also makes Begin Again with Davina McCall, No. 35 in our Top 100 today, and We Need To Talk with Paul C. Brunson, at No. 64. The Diary of a CEO itself is in audio in the major podcast apps and in video on YouTube.
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