Steven Bartlett’s The Diary Of A CEO has overtaken The Joe Rogan Experience by YouTube subscribers, with producer FlightStory pointing to multilingual distribution as a significant contributor to its growth.
The show had 21.3 million subscribers on November 1, compared with 21.2 million for Rogan’s channel, according to YouTube’s rounded public counts compiled by FlightStory. This made “the most-subscribed podcast on YouTube’s podcast charts” according to Flight Story.
The comparison covers channels associated with shows in YouTube’s US Top 100 podcast chart, ranked by their subscriber totals. It measures the channels’ accumulated subscriber bases, rather than current viewing, listening or audience per episode, and does not establish which podcast has the largest audience across all platforms.
The Diary Of A CEO has added approximately 7.1 million YouTube subscribers since late December 2025, an increase of around 50%.
FlightStory says the channel generated more than one billion views in the first ten months of 2026, compared with approximately 399 million over the equivalent period last year. Those figures cover all video formats, including Shorts, rather than full-length episodes alone. The channel published 87 full-length episodes between January and October.
International distribution has become a substantial part of the operation. According to FlightStory’s YouTube Studio data, approximately 261 million views – 23.3% of the total recorded in its January-to-October audio-track breakdown – were on tracks in languages other than English. Spanish, Russian, German, Portuguese and French led that viewing.
Bartlett said: “We owe an awful lot to our team, our guests our partners, and strategically, translating every episode of the show into more than 20+ languages has been an incredible unlock and allows us to reach the rest of the world.”
An interview with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, released on 22 October, illustrates that approach. Recorded in Ukrainian with two human interpreters, the conversation was subsequently made available in more than 20 languages using AI voice technology, according to FlightStory. The company says it attracted more than seven million views in ten days.
Bartlett began the podcast in Manchester in 2017, initially recording a personal audio diary about building a business. It later developed into an interview format and began publishing full video episodes weekly on YouTube in 2020. Its subject matter now spans business, psychology, health, relationships, science, technology and global affairs.
“When I started The Diary Of A CEO, I was sitting in my bedroom in Manchester, recording into a microphone. About 40 people listened to those first episodes. It’s quite difficult to comprehend where it’s got to today,” Bartlett said.
The show is produced by FlightStory, part of Bartlett’s creator holding company Steven.com, and is distributed on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and other podcast platforms.
