Joe Rogan might be the highest listened to podcaster on Spotify but his views and those of his guests do not resonate with many; as the streaming platform has seen a spate of cancellations on its page, after controversies surrounding him and his guests broke out. CNN reported that there has been a backlash against the podcaster and Spotify Premium has seen a spike of web traffic in its cancellation page.
On Tuesday night, SimilarWeb, an analytics firm told the outlet that there was a 196 percent hike in web traffic to the cancellation page of Spotify Premium service, week-on-week, according to its newest set of data.
The data reported that traffic starting on January 17th recorded 39,924 visits while the week starting January 24th recorded 118,168 visits. Spotify Premium charges $9.99 for a month and can reach $15.99 for a family plan. There is also a free service which has advertisements.
Although it is not possible to gauge how many of the visits ended in cancellations, the number is huge. In its latest earning reports, Spotify reported that it had $180 million subscribers who had paid membership.
Seema Shah, lead researcher at SimilarWeb told the outlet that that it was a huge spike. She added that it indicated that people might have been passionate about the Joe Rogan controversy and might have taken action against it. She said that they would monitor it to see if there was a further spike.
Joe Rogan has been in the middle of more than one controversy. The recent ones included a lot of vaccine disinformation that is aired on his podcast that have been disseminated by so called experts who are denounced by the major experts in their field. He was also called out for using the N-word several times in the past. Singers Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, artist India Arie and others left Spotify in protest.
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