TBPN earns $70 million a year and about 1,600 people listen
/Bernice Halloran reads the Podnews earnings list for who it's actually written for, and finds the tell in a nine-figure number sitting next to a four-figure audience.
TL;DR: Forbes’s 2026 highest-paid podcasters list, reported by Podnews, puts Joe Rogan at $82 million and TBPN’s John Coogan and Jordi Hayes second at $70 million, against roughly 6,800 YouTube views per episode and an estimated 1,600 monthly audio listeners. Bernice Halloran spent twenty-six years learning exactly where a reader sets a book down, and this one loses her two names in. The earnings come from guarantees, revenue share, and platform fees, not audience size, and the list never quite admits that’s what it’s measuring. That’s the tell, buried at spot two.
Twenty-six years behind a bookstore counter teaches you where people quit. Not whether they liked a book, they’ll lie to you about that on the way out the door. Where they quit: the page number, the chapter, the sentence that made them close it and set it face-down on the counter like they were returning something that had let them down. Podnews ran a piece on the highest-paid podcasters of 2026, pulling from a Forbes ranking, and I know exactly where a reader with any sense sets this one down: two lines into the second name, not at the top of the list.
Joe Rogan tops it at $82 million, which surprises nobody and needs no further comment from me. Then comes John Coogan and Jordi Hayes of TBPN at $70 million, and Podnews, to its credit, does something most outlets running this kind of list wouldn’t bother doing: it hands readers the audience numbers right next to the earnings number. TBPN pulls around 6,800 YouTube views per episode. Podscribe’s estimate puts its monthly audio audience at roughly 1,600 listeners.
Sit with that pairing, because it’s the whole review right there. Seventy million dollars a year, next to an audience you could seat in a mid-size high school gymnasium twice over. Steven Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO comes in third at $45 million. Ashley Flowers’ Crime Junkie, fourth, $42 million. SmartLess, fifth, $37 million split three ways. Charlamagne Tha God shows up tenth at $27 million. Spotify owns four of the top twenty, SiriusXM three, Red Seat Ventures and Wondery two apiece. All of it gets presented like it’s telling readers something about podcasting as a medium people actually listen to.
The methodology line undercuts that framing, if you read it instead of skimming straight to the names: these figures come from minimum guarantees, revenue share, platform fees, and live-event money, tallied June 2025 through June 2026. Minimum guarantees and platform fees describe what a network, a platform, or an equity stake decided a name was worth locking down before somebody else did. They don’t describe what an audience paid to hear something. TBPN’s number is a bet already placed on influence that doesn’t have to show up in a download count to matter to the people writing the checks.
Here’s where I’d tell a customer to put the book back on the shelf. Any list like this gets framed as settling who’s winning podcasting, and the moment you check the winner against 1,600 monthly listeners, the list turns out to measure something else entirely. A listener trying to decide what’s worth the next forty minutes of their day gets nothing useful from it. A reader who came looking for what’s actually good, actually reaching people, walks away with a number that answers neither question. That reader closes the tab at TBPN, the same way they’d close a book the moment the plot stops matching the jacket copy.
Who’s it for, then, if not the listener? Ad buyers deciding where influence-money goes regardless of raw reach. Talent agents pricing the next deal off the last one. Other podcasters, checking where the ceiling sits this year. Podnews knows its own trade well enough to hand readers the audience numbers instead of burying them, which is more honesty than most outlets running this kind of list bother with, and it’s the one thing that makes this piece worth finishing instead of getting set face-down at paragraph three. Every other earnings list published this year owes its readers that same footnote. Most won’t run it, because an $82 million headline sells better than a 1,600-listener asterisk sitting two names down.
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