Diary of a CEO tops Joe Rogan in YouTube podcast subscribers
The Diary Of A CEO is ahead of The Joe Rogan Experience in YouTube subscribers. The lead is small, and it comes from the show's own producer, but the numbers behind it show that viewers who do not speak English are a big part of the growth.
A lead of 0.1 million subscribers
On 1 November 2026, at 13:40 GMT, YouTube's public counts showed 21.3 million subscribers for Steven Bartlett's show. The Joe Rogan Experience stood at 21.2 million. The comparison covers shows in YouTube's Top 100 podcast chart, and YouTube rounds public counts to three significant figures.
The producer, FlightStory, says the channel gained about 7.1 million subscribers this year. Its count was about 14.2 million on 29 December 2025, which is growth of roughly 50%.
A billion views, a quarter of them not in English
Between 1 January and 30 October 2026, the channel recorded more than 1 billion views. In the first ten months of 2025 it had about 399 million. Those figures cover all formats, Shorts included. In that period the channel published 87 full-length video episodes.
About 261 million of this year's views, nearly a quarter, were on audio tracks in languages other than English. Spanish, Russian, German, Portuguese and French lead that list. The show is now available in more than 20 languages.
One example is the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy episode, released on 22 October 2026. It was recorded in Ukrainian with two human interpreters. AI voice technology then produced versions in more than 20 languages. After 10 days it had passed 7 million views.
From a bedroom microphone to a production team
Nine years ago Bartlett was recording an audio diary alone in his Manchester bedroom. His kit was a cheap microphone and a sock standing in for a pop filter. In his words: "About 40 people listened to those first episodes."
The show began in 2017 as a story about building a business and later turned to interviews. Weekly full-video episodes on YouTube began in 2020. Today a staff covering research, production, guest booking, editing and strategy works on it.
Other rankings back up the show's standing. Podscribe placed it first by average audience per episode in March 2026 and July 2026. Spotify listed it second in its global Top Podcasts for 2025. Bartlett won the 2026 Webby Award for Individual Creator: Podcast, and the show took Best Business & Finance Podcast at the 2026 iHeartPodcast Awards.
Our view
A 0.1 million gap on counts that YouTube rounds is thin, and the figures are a single snapshot from one afternoon, supplied by the show's producer. The more durable point is the language data. If a quarter of views already come from translated audio tracks, the next test is whether that audience keeps subscribing at the same pace. The channel's own YouTube Studio numbers, shared again later, would show it.
Source: Podnews