Joe Rogan’s $100 Million Move to Spotify is a Big Heads Up to YouTube

• The Joe Rogan Experience is one of the most-watched channels on YouTube, with more than 8 million subscribers.
• Rogan’s content will become exclusive to Spotify at the end of the year.
• According to rumors, the move is a rebellion against YouTube’s seemingly “unfair” censorship on his content.

American comedian, UFC commentator, and podcast favorite Joe Rogan’s The Joe Rogan Experience is one of the most-watched YouTube shows for years. So when Rogan announced that he is moving his podcast to Spotify, it was definitely big news for the industry and it sent a huge message to YouTube.

Apparently, Rogan was lured away from the Google-owned streaming service at the tune of a mind-boggling $100 million. But more than the massive payout, the move was rumored to be a rebellion against YouTube’s seemingly “unfair” censorship of his content.

Joe Rogan is just one of the many content creators who has protested against YouTube’s stifling censorship policies.

Lots of content creators, including Rogan, has complained about YouTube demonetising their videos. For the uninitiated, demonetisation refers to how YouTube removes the advertisements from videos, which leads to less earnings for the creators.

YouTube does that primarily because some advertisers are not pleased to see their products advertised on channels that have “problematic” or “controversial” content.

Rogan’s show definitely belongs to the category as the podcast covers topics ranging from politics to sports to entertainment, with Rogan talking uninhibitedly to his guests, which include Hollywood superstars, billionaires, and presidential candidates.

Rogan’s guests include sports superstars. On one of his episodes, his guest was former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson.

On top of that, Rogan unflinchingly lets guests smoke weed in some episodes: Tesla founder Elon Musk did exactly that.

“They’re scrambling for control. They want to control the way people communicate. And they also want to make a profit. See part of this is they’re incentivizing people to do shows that they can profit off of. So if you have a show that has no bad language, if you have a show that has no controversial topics, those shows are more appealing to advertisers. So for them, as a business, they’ll look at someone like me and say, ‘Well this is a limited advertisers option’,” Rogan said in October 2019.

His channel, “PowerfulJRE”, has more than 8 million subscribers. Estimates say that he gets around 400 million views per month. Despite this, he still decided to make the major switch to Spotify and his content will become exclusive there by the end of the year.