Is Ben Shapiro
the New Rush Limbaugh?
By Howard Polskin, April 13, 2021
Ben Shapiro is by far the most listened to conservative podcaster. In fact, it’s not even close, according to information from a popular podcasting app.
For those not familiar, Shapiro is a 37-year-old conservative political commentator and semi-permanent resident of television green rooms, who achieved fame as a syndicated national columnist at 17 and book author at 20. He also is the co-founder of the popular conservative website The Daily Wire, which he also co-owns. Shapiro announced plans in February to enter the feature film business, snagging cancelled “Mandalorian” star Gina Carano as talent for an unnamed project. The force is clearly with him.
In the wake of Rush Limbaugh’s death earlier this year, Shapiro was one of a handful of conservative radio hosts and podcasters supposedly poised to become the new king of right-wing talk. Picking Shapiro as the heir apparent to adorn Limbaugh’s crown isn’t exactly an original thought (see Caleb Ecarma’s March 31 Vanity Fair article). However, the data I’ve supplied sheds new light on Shapiro’s massive popularity for his daily hour-long podcast where he riffs on the topic du jour. (Recent one: “Woka-Cola Tastes Like Garbage.”)
A few caveats before I get into the weeds. My numbers are based on data from the Castbox app, which is the fifth most popular app on the largest paid podcast hosting platform Buzzsprout. It is the only podcast app that I found that provides rankings with the actual number of subscriptions as well as plays of episodes. However, Castbox only represents 2.1% of all downloads that Buzzsprout serves. Spotify (29.4%) and Apple Podcasts (29.3%) rank as the most popular apps followed by Google Podcasts (2.3%), Web Browser (2.3%) and then Castbox. So it’s a tight keyhole that I’m looking through to add some context into the popularity of the top 20 conservative podcasters in my chart.
My findings show that “The Ben Shapiro Show” has 412,764 subscribers as of April 1 (the numbers are updated daily, but for the purposes of my work, I “freeze” the numbers the first of every month for month-to-month comparisons). Even more impressive, his show has racked up more than 30 million plays, a metric that indicates serious engagement. By comparison, the second-ranked conservative podcast that I’ve tracked on Castbox, “Bill O’Reilly’s No-Spin News,” had 107,342 subscribers and only 1.3 million plays.
Now here’s where I’m going to venture out on a limb with a big take-it-with-a-grain-of-salt analysis. If Castbox represents 2.1% of Buzzsprout’s podcast app downloads, let’s then extrapolate Shapiro’s 412,764 by a factor of 50. Doing the math, I would therefore estimate the podcast has more than 20 million subscriptions just through the Buzzsprout platform! That suggests millions of people may be walking around every day with Ben Shapiro literally talking into their ears. And there are many platforms similar to Buzzsprout such as Captivate, Podbean and Simplecast. So the number of listeners is likely to be much higher. I reached out to Ben Shapiro for comment about the size of his audience and what’s driving this apparent popularity, but he did not respond to my emails.
“The Ben Shapiro Show” has grown into the big fish in the conservative podcast pond. Swimming in the overall news-and-opinion podcast category on the Castbox app, cuts the program down to size. It’s dwarfed by podcasts like “Serial” (1.5 million subscriptions), “The Daily” from The New York Times (1.1 million subscriptions), and especially “The Joe Rogan Experience” (3.1 million). But those are the whales. Shapiro more than holds his own against podcasts from well-regarded content providers with podcast like “Washington Post Reports” (16,513 subscriptions), “CNN 5 Things” (30,680 subscriptions) and “The NPR Politics Podcast” (343,739). Again – and I can’t emphasize this enough – the subscription numbers I’m using are only from the Castbox app, one of many podcasting apps in the marketplace.
Next month I’ll have some month-to-month comparisons for all the top 20 conservative podcasters so you can see just who’s growing fastest – and slowest.
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BIG BEN: It’s not even close. “The Ben Shapiro Show” ranks as the top-rated conservative podcast for the month of April. But keep in mind, the above figures were based on Castbox information, a podcasting app representing 2.1% of the downloads across all podcasts on the Buzzsprout podcast hosting platform.
