The banners want it. But Steven Bartlett says that he can develop his media empire better than anyone. Now he faces the American market to prove it.
By Alexandra YorkForbes staff
He`SA Monday morning in March, and Steven Bartlett seated in his studio in the Hip Shoreditch district of London to record the last episode of his successful podcast The Journal of a CEO. With more than 10 million YouTube subscribers and 20 million social media followers, the interview show is one of the most popular in the world. Only Joe Rogan has more listeners with regard to hosted podcasts. Today, Bartlett records a debate between economic influencer Gary Stevenson and entrepreneur Daniel Priestly, where they will support if entrepreneurship can save the middle class. The episode will later attract 3.6 million views and more than 46,000 comments on YouTube alone.
The debate is ardent, but the buzzing content is only the reason why the millions of people also play a vital role. Bartlett, who launched two social media companies before hitting the reputation of the podcast, has already tested and optimized all aspects of the show. He calibrated every detail for maximum attention: capital letters and exclamation points in the title of the episode (“Emergency debate: they lied about the economy by recovering!”), The lighting, the angles of the camera – even its eyebrows raised in the photo of the miniature of the preview. Each factor is part of the Bartlett plan to attract viewers.
Said Bartlett, 32: “I have not met a single podcast network, a company, a media conglomerate in the world that can help you develop your podcast using modern platforms in the way we can.”
And grow up that he has. Launched in 2017 as a hobby to allow Bartlett to enter the minds of other CEOs, the Podcast attracted more than a billion flows, including 50 million monthly listeners in December only. The guests went from the actor Trevor Noah and the YouTube Titan Mrbeast to a mixture of self-assistance experts, including gurus of longevity, nutritionists and sex. In 2024 – Thank you for its mixture of fascinating content and growth hacking – Bartlett says that the franchise generated $ 20 million in income from brand partnerships with brands like Linkedin, Oracle and Shopify, Speaking Commitments, and hawking products such as hooded and brand journals.
He is there to do even more – and do it as a free agent. While other podcast royalties have signed mega agreements with streaming networks (read: the $ 125 million partnership from Alex Cooper with Sirius XM; the $ 250 million agreement from Joe Rogan with Spotify), Bartlett relies on its own. It is not for lack of interest. Last October, Bartlett flew from London to New York to meet several of the world’s largest media networks to discuss potential partnerships. Bartlett will not say who or how much, but Forbes estimates that $ 100 million contracts were at stake.
Why refuse Frothy offers? For Bartlett, the choice is simple – he thinks he can do it better solo. “We examined what they did in terms of tests, experimentation, innovation and I felt like I was looking at the past,” explains Bartlett. “When I see what’s going on here, I look at the future.”
The future was far from certain in 2017 when Bartlett launched the podcast. Unknown in the social media sphere and lacking significant follow -up, Bartlett relied on data analysis and a constant experiment to develop. Soon he tested A / B all aspects of the podcast: keywords, legends, punctuation – even if it is necessary to smile on the preview photo (the serious air generally worked the best). But it was 2020 before he really started to invest in the show. Bartlett says it was an episode of 2023 with the former leader of Google Mo Gawdat who changed the game for the Podcast.
“Apple said it was the episode of the most shared podcast of 2023 in this part of the world,” said Bartlett, adding “this episode taught me that the most important thing in podcasting is not really the amount of followers that someone has or how famous they are. It is ultimately the value it gives, because people will share it.”
Growing up, Bartlett always felt like a stranger. Born in Botswana, Africa, a Nigerian mother and a British father, his family moved to the English countryside when he was young. He felt like an underperforming compared to his two brothers and looked different from everyone at school.
“I was desperate to fill this shame or insecurity to be the black kid or the poor child … The way I thought I could fill it was the validation of doing something great,” explains Bartlett. “Whether I was trained or led, I think the two are indistinguishable.”
Validation came from entrepreneurship. In 2013, he signed up for the Manchester Metropolitan University, but quickly abandoned to build Wallpark, an online messaging forum so that students share local events and commercial manuals. Although he only run the startup for a year, he gave him a master’s degree in digital marketing. “It showed me the power of social media at a time when people were quite upset and negative on this subject,” explains Bartlett. “The most important thing of this period of my life has been to understand this new economy of attention and to be able to cultivate and build a general public on the Internet thanks to content.”
In 2014, Bartlett launched Social Chain, a marketing company that connected brands with potential customers thanks to content generated by users. The startup made him a young millionaire. In 2019, he merged it with Lumaland to form a public company of $ 200 million. He also won Bartlett a place on the list of Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe in 2020. He left the social channel the same year because he and the board of directors do not agree on the management of the company, and he did not have enough controlling participation to make the decisions he wanted. But its growing commercial renown led him to Dragon’s DenThe British investment show preceding America Shark tank. And he has since invested in unicorn companies like SpaceX and Whoop. However, he wanted to build something new. “I wondered:” Because now I have the money and I can do what I want with my life – what would I do? ” “, Said Bartlett. “The answer was noisy and clear in my brain -” this little podcast that you started. »»
Bartlett spent £ 50,000 for tools such as gopros and self-evolutive cameras to build The Journal of a CEO full time. Soon, he published twice a week, went to video and invested in new analyzes. Take the pre -watch – A personalized system which follows the commitment of 1,000 volunteers who watch an episode before it is published. A click of the space bar means that they are particularly interested, while the diverted eyes show that they lose attention. The Bartlett team changes the episode according to this attention data to maximize the public’s interest in the final modification. Bartlett then uses his status as a free agent to share his optimized episodes on data on the whole of the social media ecosystem: YouTube, Apple, Spotify, Instagram, Tiktok and X.
“The biggest impact on the media has been the fragmentation of the public,” explains Naveen Sarma, director general of S&P Global specializing in media analysis. “You can do things, but bring people to watch it so that you can monetize it was the biggest challenge, especially for independent guys.”
Bartlett, believing that he has answered the problem of fragmentation, now evolves his strategy of data with more emissions. In 2023, he joined Georgie Holt and Christiana Brenton of the Podcast industry industry to launch a studio called Flight Story. Today, they produce five podcasts and build commercial deductibles around each host – book offers, speeches, investment opportunities and products.
“The most efficient creators are multi-contained and multi-platform-form,” says Karin Bäckmark of Spotify, who supervised podcasts for the United Kingdom, Ireland and the Nordics. Bäckmark says that today’s video is crucial because it allows creators to adopt an agnostic approach to share the content. For Bartlett, the viral episode ViLod Flood Instagram and Tiktok, while the interviews are published in full on YouTube and streaming platforms.
“We see that it really deepens the relationship with viewers, and video shows seem to grow so much faster than audio shows,” says Bäckmark.
Bartlett has major projects for his next content creation phase. He recently moved to Los Angeles to have better access to high caliber Hollywood talents. And he is preparing to launch a New York seat to get closer to the media and brands.
Always with an attentive eye on innovation and growth, Bartlett also plunges into AI. Flight Story currently releases a podcast made in AI using his voice. Bartlett says that users know that the show is generated by AI and that it always has a solid retention rate, with 60% of the public that remains at the end. The replication of AI scares him, but not as much as the idea that someone else does it first.
“There is always a bulldozer that comes for you,” explains Bartlett. “You have the choice to be struck by the bulldozer or drive the bulldozer.”
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