Diary of a CEO Is the Podcast Chart Topper in Three Countries

Three countries kept their own separate charts this weekend and landed on the same answer. The Diary of a CEO was the podcast chart topper on Spotify's Business ranking in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia on October 17 and again on October 18, according to chart tracker Podhash.

The wider ranking tells the same story. On Spotify's Top Podcasts chart for October 18, the podcast chart topper was second in Canada and second in Australia, behind only The Joe Rogan Experience in both countries, Podhash's records show. It placed seventh in the United Kingdom and ninth in the United States, after climbing two places in a single day. It even reached fifth on the Business chart in Germany, which rounds out a weekend where the podcast chart topper led category charts in four countries at once.

Spotify builds a separate set of charts for each country it ranks, drawn from the listening inside that country, and every chart updates daily, according to Spotify. The Top Podcasts chart ranks the top two hundred shows in each country by weekly unique audience, while the Business chart lists the top fifty. A show appears on the category chart matching the first category listed in its feed, Spotify says, and for The Diary of a CEO that category is Business.

A streak measured in weeks, not days

Two days at the top makes a headline. The longer view says the lead is closer to two months. Podhash's records for the three Business charts begin on August 24, and on every day since for which it has a reading, the podcast chart topper was the same show: fifty-two days in the United States and fifty-three days each in the United Kingdom and Australia. Spotify's own charts site showed the same three Business leads when checked on October 19, the report says.

The figures were compiled on Bartlett's official website from Podhash's daily readings and cross-checked against Spotify's own charts. That source comes with a caveat: the numbers are the subject's own best telling of the story. The readings themselves are public, and they line up.

Why the show keeps climbing

The host is Steven Bartlett, the entrepreneur and investor who joined Dragons' Den as its youngest-ever Dragon, the BBC reported. He founded Steven.com, a company the report values at four hundred twenty-five million dollars. He has spent years building the show around long-form conversations, and the measurement firms have started to notice. Those numbers explain how a business interview show became the podcast chart topper on Spotify's charts across three continents.

Podscribe's July rankings placed The Diary of a CEO first in the world by downloads and views per episode, a position it also held in the firm's March rankings, and called it "the most consistent show" in July, ranking inside the top ten on all three of its charts. Among the biggest podcasts by audio reach that month, it drew the most combined downloads and views, about fifty-seven point six million. The per-episode figure was about four point four million, ahead of Crime Junkie in second. Podscribe is an IAB-certified podcast advertising measurement firm whose monthly rankings combine podcast downloads with YouTube views.

Spotify's own year-end list points the same way: the show was the second most popular podcast in the world in its Wrapped results for twenty twenty-five. Social Blade data from early October suggested it was YouTube's fastest-growing podcast and the most-watched long-form podcast on the platform. Those figures make the podcast chart topper a cross-platform story.

The competition is not standing still. Spotify renewed its agreement with Joe Rogan on October 8 in a deal estimated at about two hundred fifty million dollars, analyticsinsight reported, which is one reason the podcast chart topper keeps finishing second to Rogan on the overall charts. The full chart breakdown, with country-by-country positions, was published on Bartlett's official site.

The rest of the industry is moving in the same direction. Spotify keeps pushing audio beyond music, as its audiobook expansion in Nigeria showed, and interview formats keep scaling up, with Louis Theroux's podcast doubling its episode output this month. The Business chart, for now, has one name on it in three countries.