is, i m just asking questions, i just want to understand what different people think, but it risks pushing people towards these extremes that they otherwise wouldn t have been aware of. and i guess that taps in, doesn t it, to the fact there are two interesting questions here? one is, should these people even be on his podcast in the first place? but the second is, if they re going to be there, how does he handle what they say? now, batya from newsweek, i definitely want to ask you about that. before we do, though, here s a little of a post that joe rogan put on instagram a few days into this story. one of the things that spotify wants to do that i agree with is that, at the beginning of these controversial podcasts, like specifically ones about covid, is to put a disclaimer and say that you should speak with your physician
claims and that something that is true in isolation will be used to push false claims about the vaccine, for example. and we often see that in discussions like on podcasts, where people will go back and forth, they will be trying to understand someone else s perspective, and it spirals and spirals. and briefly, elizabeth, finally, do you think that technology companies, which is what they were initially, like spotify, are geared up to handle these editorial challenges? of course they should be. spotify isn t just a technology i company, it s a media company. and, yes, that s what its- actual employees have been asking since the minute. that they signed the deal with rogan in 2020. its entire employee base said, well, let sjust develop somej editorial control now that - we re in the podcast business, just the way any other. company like the bbc or the washington post that s in the podcast - business does it. i ve got to exert a little bit of controljust on this programme because
right now, advertising revenue is a really small portion - of spotify s revenue. they make only about 15%. they make much more from subscriptions. - but when you look at the kind of ad prices that ads - in an exclusive podcast| can generate, you start to understand also why they re going into it, i not just differentiation, because streaming. l any artist can stream i in ten different places, so there s no differentiation in streaming why it s hardj to make money. so you make these exclusive l deals with these really popular podcasters who are only. going to host their content on your service. and because of that, you can command really high ad prices, and they re staking their future on all of that. i so you get the money in return. but as you say, with that comes responsibilities. let s speak about that with marianna spring, bbc news s disinformation reporter, because, marianna, joe rogan has been accused of a range of things when it comes to covid misinformation. just guide us t
i will be back at the top of the hour, but no one bbc news, time to the media show. now on the bbc news, it s time for the media show. hello, i m ros atkins. welcome to this week s media show. we re going to talk about bbc three because it s back as a linear television channel, six years after the bbc decided it shouldn t be one of those. and we ll talk about spotify and joe rogan. he s in the middle of a storm over covid misinformation that may have been on his podcast, and some people are saying, should spotify really be funding content like that? we will get into all of the issues that raises. let me introduce you to our guests. we have elizabeth dwoskin, silicon valley correspondent at the washington post, jake kanter, media correspondent at the times, rosanna pound woods, who s a producer of the catch up on bbc three, and batya ungar sargon, deputy opinion editor on newsweek. and, batya, i wonder you commission lots of opinion pieces.
ok, and when neil young offered the option to spotify of young or rogan as he put it so far, spotify has chosen rogan. this is a man who s become a podcasting phenomenon. there are millions of downloads for every single podcast. he has millions of followers on social media, and let me give you an idea of what his podcasts are like. sometimes the conversations can be very long, over three hours. here s a little of one with elon musk last year, which eventually drifted onto the question of the human race beyond earth. could you colonise the galaxy in a million years? absolutely. the entire galaxy. so you would start with mars, build bases on mars, then you d use mars to jump off to all these other planets, set up places there, and over thousands of years, easily.? yeah. kind of like, you know, from one solar system to the next. and.yeah. that s something for us to consider. jake kanter, let s bring you in here, media correspondent at the times. can you explain to us why spotify, a