The Highest-Paid List, the Subscription Land Grab, and a $3B Video Ad Market

Reid Mercer: Welcome back to the Download, I'm Reid Mercer. This week's got a theme running under everything, even if the headlines don't say it out loud. Forbes just dropped its 2026 highest paid podcasters list, and the names are the usual suspects. Rogan, a football tight end with impeccable timing, and a wellness guru turned mogul. But the number that matters isn't the paycheck, it's who actually owns the audience walking away with it. Then we've got three separate companies, a news network, a cable anchor, and a wrestling promotion. all making the same land grab for own distribution, and I'll tell you why that smells like radio consolidation from thirty years ago. There's also a video ad number floating around – three billion dollars – and I want a stress test, because measurement in this business still doesn't add up the way people pretend it does, and we'll get into what happens when a show's entire value sits on one person's name using a very public podcast ad. Asset exit is the case study. Follow the money. That's the whole approach today. So let's start where the money actually landed first, the 2026 earnings list, and what it's really telling us. We want to hear from you. Submit questions via the web form in the description or give us a call at 747-234-2678 and leave your question. Don't be shy. Our AI assistant makes it super easy. Eighty-two million dollars. That's Joe Rogan's number on Forbes' 2026 list. InsideRadio broke down the list this week, and the top 20 podcasters combined pulled in $638 million. Follow the money, though, because Rogan topping the chart isn't the real story here. The real story is Travis Kelce. Sports reported this week that New Heights posted numbers timed to Chiefs training camp. gap. And that tells you everything about where the value actually sits. It's not the show driving the audience; it's the athlete. Kelce could walk to a different feed tomorrow and the audience walks with him. Compare that to Jay Shetty. Forbes' Matt Craig reported the wellness guru turned mogul signed a deal worth roughly a hundred million with Spotify and Netflix, but the structure matters more than the headline number. How much of that is guaranteed? And how much is tied to hitting targets on what Shetty calls his conscious empire. That's a margin question. Executives should ask which portion the network is actually on the hook for. Then there's Joe Budden. Matt Craig's Forbes piece on Budden this week lays it out: his whole pitch is that he doesn't trust big media companies with his career, so he built his own operation instead. Budden kept ownership; he didn't cash a platform check and hope the audience would Speaker 2: follow. Reid Mercer: The ads showed up wherever the platform pointed them. Three models, three different vets. Rogan's the brand who commands top dollar wherever he sits. Kelce's the athlete whose value depends on where he's standing this season. Budden's the operator who owns the pipe. So here's what I'd want my team asking Monday morning: When you're paying for a personality, are you buying the audience or are you renting it for as long as that personality feels like showing up? And if the answer is renting, what happens to your P&L the day that personality decides to build their own thing the way Budden did? So is that exact fear, paying nine figures for an audience you don't own, why networks are suddenly racing to build subscription channels and owned pipelines around content that can't just walk out the door. Critical pacing question just got literal. Three plays landed this week, all chasing the same asset-owned distribution. Start with ABC. Podcast News Daily reported the network built a 20/20 true crime plus a paid subscription channel on Apple Podcasts wrapped around decades of true crime archive. Notice what they're monetizing, the back catalog. 20 years of 20/20 segments sitting in a vault just became a recurring revenue line. Realscreen covered the same launch-exclusive content, archive access, subscriber perks—that's the model: take content you already own, lock it behind the door. Now compare that to Don Lemon. The Hollywood Reporter's Caitlin Huston reported Lemon signed with Libsyn specifically to build a network, adding outside creators and chasing distribution on news channels. He's building his own pipes instead of renting somebody else's platform. And then there's wrestling. Barrett Media quoted Tony Khan saying an AEW podcast network is coming, tied to the promotion's content growth. Different audience, same instinct; own the vertical before someone else prices you out of it. I've seen this movie: nineteen nineties radio; every group, Clear Channel, Jacor, Chancellor, raced to buy up stations before consolidation caps changed the math on carriage fees. Whoever owned the signal set the price; whoever rented it paid whatever the owner asked at the next renewal. Audios run in the same play now with subscriptions and networks instead of station licenses; ABC owns the archive, Lemon's trying to own the pipes, Khan wants to own a genre. My Monday morning flag for executives audit what you actually own outright versus what's licensed or platform dependent. If Apple or Spotify reprice is carriage the way cable did to networks in the 90s, who's exposed? The renters, every time. Which raises the money question underneath all of it: subscriptions versus ad dollars. Three billion in video podcast ad spend is up for grabs right now, and nobody's measurement stack agrees on how to count it. Now flip that on its head. Three billion dollars. That's the number MediaPost's Wayne Friedman put on U.S. video podcast ad spending this week. Sounds huge, right? Except ask the question I always ask first – three billion of what exactly? Video podcast ad spend gets counted differently depending on whether you're measuring impressions on YouTube, completed views on Spotify, or a pre-roll baked into an audio feed that – That happens to have a camera pointed But at the host. Nobody's using the same ruler. And when nobody's using the same ruler, guess who benefits? The platform selling the ad, not the buyer trying to figure out what they actually paid for. Here's what makes it messier. Inside Radio and Podcast News Daily both flagged the same MRI-Simmons study this week. Podcast listening now reaches 89 million U.S. adults monthly, and a growing share of them bounce between the audio and video versions of the same Speaker 2: podcast. Reid Mercer: of the same show. Think about what that does to frequency capping. I hear your ad on the drive home, then see it again on the YouTube version that night. Does that count as one impression or two? Most ad servers count it twice. That's arbitrage dressed up as reach. Smart buyers already know this. They're asking their agencies for deduplicated cross-platform numbers before signing off on next quarter's spend. If your team isn't asking that Monday morning, somebody else's is. else's is. So where's the money actually landing while measurement catches up? Physical space. Yahoo's Genevieve Walker got inside Jay Shetty's new Netflix-adjacent studio, built nice enough by her account to host Oprah and Lucy Hale on camera. That's not a podcast set. That's a television production budget wearing a podcast credential because whoever wrote that check believes video is where the ad dollars, real or inferred or inflated are going to land. The three billion figure might be soft, the behavior behind it isn't. Money's moving toward video capture, cross-platform reach is getting sold before it's properly counted, and studios like Shetty's are getting built regardless, which raises a different question: forget the math for a second. Who's actually irreplaceable in this business when the format keeps shifting under them? Speaking of talent risk, look at 9021OMG this week. Tori Spelling's out. Jennie Garth is finishing the last two seasons of the Beverly Hills 90210 re-watch podcast solo. Just Jared broke the exit, and Yahoo's Ryan Hudgins and Mike Vulpo confirmed Garth is carrying on without her. Entertainment Weekly quoted Garth directly. We started this together. That's not just a wistful line for a magazine. A rewatch show like this is joint custody of a brand, two hosts, one shared nostalgia asset, split fifty fifty on the thing people actually tune in for. So when one half walks, what happens to the ad reads already sold against both names? That license probably runs through a network. Big deal. Not a handshake between friends. Nobody's publishing that contract language, but somebody at that network is rereading it this week. Meanwhile, over at OpenAI, Sam Altman floated what Fortune, via Morning Brew, called a cool use case for ChatGPT, a daily AI-generated podcast about your own kids. The replies were brutal. One person basically asked why anyone would want a robot's take on their own child. That reaction tells you exactly where synthetic audio hits its ceiling in this business. Nobody's subscribing to a formula. They're subscribing to a person. You can't automate a fan base's trust and faith they've followed for years. That gap is the entire premium this industry pays for. So run the tape back on everything we covered this hour- Rogan's number, Shetty's deal, the ABC subscription push, the ad spend fight-every one of those valuations assumes a specific human being shows up next week. Tori Spelling didn't show up this week; a nine figure media deal doesn't have a line item for that. If you're structuring one of these deals, ask what happens. What happens contractually the day the talent doesn't renew? Check the contract for a key person clause before the next renewal cycle. So that's the download. If there's one thing worth carrying into your Monday meetings, it's this. Budden built his own model instead of renting a platform's audience. Kelce, Shetty, even Rogan, they're valuable because people follow them, not the feed they sit on. Ownership beats rental every time. That's the real story under all these deal numbers. Anyway, if this episode saved you from nodding along in a roomful of people who hadn't thought about unit economics, forward it to a colleague. That's the best compliment we get. Tips, feedback, deal intel, the download at HeyMado.com. We read everything. Subscribe, leave a review, tell a friend who still thinks downloads equal listeners. Thanks for spending this time with me. I'm Reid Mercer. Talk to you next episode.