Forbes put a $638 million price tag on podcasting’s top tier this week, its estimate of what the 20 highest-paid hosts earned between June 2025 and June 2026. Joe Rogan led at $82 million, driven largely by his Spotify deal. The full ranking, compiled by Matt Craig, published on the Forbes site on July 30.

Two entries at opposite ends of the list explain how that money now gets made. At No. 2 sit John Coogan and Jordi Hays of TBPN, at an estimated $70 million. At No. 20 sit Hannah Berner and Paige DeSorbo of Giggly Squad, at an estimated $18 million.

Read together, they mark a shift in what a podcast is worth and to whom. The ceiling here was not set by an advertiser or a platform. It was set by an AI lab writing an acquisition check, a different kind of buyer with a different reason to pay.

Start with the number that jumps. Forbes estimates Coogan and Hays netted close to $70 million, and it attributes most of that to a single event: OpenAI’s purchase of their 11-person company. The show launched in October 2024. The deal closed roughly a year and a half later.

An AI Lab Set the Earnings Ceiling

OpenAI acquired TBPN in April 2026 for an estimated $150 million in cash and stock, its first purchase of a media company. Forbes notes the show grew from about $5 million in advertising in its first year to a projected $30 million in its second. Rockwater analyst Chris Erwin called the deal an acqui-hire.

That is the mechanic worth understanding. In an acqui-hire, the buyer pays for the team and its position more than for current revenue. The cash flow is secondary to the asset the company can become.

Hays framed the sale as a bet on the buyer. “While we’ve been critical of the industry at times, after getting to know Sam and the OpenAI team, what stood out most was their openness to feedback and commitment to getting this right,” he wrote in a statement when the deal was announced.

Reality TV Now Has an Earnings Benchmark

The Giggly Squad entry works differently and matters for a different reason. Berner and DeSorbo met on Bravo’s Summer House. Their $18 million debut is the clearest public figure yet for what reality-TV fame converts to as podcast revenue.

That number is a benchmark, not a one-off. It gives every reality alum with a microphone a price to point at when a deal comes up. Forbes reports Giggly Squad is eyeing a large new deal in fall 2026.

Forbes counts minimum guarantees, revenue sharing, platform fees, and live events paid to talent or their companies, before taxes and fees. It excludes TV, endorsements, investments, and YouTube-only shows. So these are podcast earnings narrowly defined, which makes the $18 million floor more striking, not less.

The rest of the list fills in the middle. Ashley Flowers and Steven Bartlett both placed among the 20. Their presence rounds out a cohort where true-crime and business formats now sit beside comedy and reality talk.

The collective figure tells the market story. A $638 million top 20, anchored by an acquisition rather than an ad deal, signals that podcasts have become assets a strategic buyer will purchase outright.

Giggly Squad’s next contract is already in motion for the fall. The floor its $18 million set is the number that deal will be measured against.

Ahmad Muhammad

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Ashley Flowers earned an estimated $42 million from her podcast work over the past year, ranking fourth on Forbes‘ Highest-Paid Podcasters of 2026, published Thursday. That places the Crime Junkie co-host and Audiochuck founder above every other woman in the medium.

The figure retires a persistent misconception. The title had long been pinned on Alex Cooper, who ranked eighth at $32 million for Call Her Daddy. Flowers cleared her by $10 million, and she did it without a major platform on her cap table.

That distinction is the whole story for the creator economy. Cooper’s number runs through a SiriusXM deal. Flowers built and still controls Audiochuck, the Indianapolis network she founded in 2017 and grew across audio, and that ownership is what put her ahead of platform-signed talent.

The earnings sit on top of a distribution deal. Audiochuck signed a $150 million agreement last October with two Fox subsidiaries, Tubi for video distribution and Red Seat Ventures for ad sales, Forbes reported. Flowers keeps the shows; the partners pay to distribute them and sell the advertising against them.

That structure is the mechanic worth understanding. Podcasters generally retain the intellectual property in their shows, so a network licenses distribution and ad rights rather than buying the content outright. The creator collects a guarantee plus a share, and keeps the asset.

The deal’s terms trace the next frontier. Fox and Audiochuck announced the pact on October 30, 2025, and it covers Crime Junkie, The Deck, So Supernatural, Dark Downeast, Park Predators, and more. It also builds a Crime Junkie FAST channel across Tubi and Fox One, pushing an audio network into free ad-supported streaming video.

Video is where the money compounds. Forbes tied the majority of Flowers’ revenue to Crime Junkie as her flagship, with the new FAST channel set to run several Audiochuck shows on YouTube at once. The company’s shows stay on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.

Flowers framed the deal as a proof point for independents. She said it “represents the next evolution of what independent media can achieve.”

The network’s scale explains why Fox paid. Audiochuck has grown past 20 weekly and seasonal shows and draws more than 10 million monthly listeners, the company said at the announcement. Before the Tubi pact, Audiochuck ran its distribution through SiriusXM under a deal first signed in 2021.

The Tubi channel is the next milestone to watch. Its build-out determines whether an independently owned audio network can turn free streaming video into the earnings line that platform contracts have long delivered.

Ahmad Muhammad

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Average annual influencer marketing budgets grew 171% year over year, per CreatorIQ‘s 2025-2026 State of Creator Marketing Report, the headline figure at Creator Economy Live East, the Clarion Events summit that filled the New York Marriott Marquis on July 29.

Read the number closely and the story sharpens. Nearly two-thirds of that increase was not new marketing money. It was reallocated from traditional paid and digital advertising, mostly television and display, the same report found.

For independent and mid-tier creators, that distinction is the opportunity. A budget line that grows by pulling from TV is a budget line that has moved into media planning, where deals get bigger, longer, and harder to cancel. Creator partnerships now compete for dollars that used to buy commercials.

The Money Left TV And Found Creators

CreatorIQ’s report puts hard figures behind the shift. Enterprises now invest an average of $5.6 million to $8.1 million a year in creators, with industry leaders averaging $7.8 million. Those are media-budget numbers, not experiment-line numbers.

The mechanics matter here. When spend migrates from paid media into creator programs, it arrives with paid media’s expectations: measurement, return on investment, and renewal cycles. That favors creators who can show performance data over creators who sell reach alone.

The company also found 71% of organizations reported budget increases. A rising line item across most of the market signals a category that has stopped proving itself and started scaling.

Chris Harrington, the company’s chief executive, framed the maturity plainly.

“Creator marketing is no longer a side tactic,” Harrington said. “It’s become the growth engine where content, community, and commerce converge.”

Who Was In The Room

The attendee list read like a media-buying floor. The event drew more than 500 brands, including The Walt Disney Company, Estee Lauder, American Express, L’Oreal, and the NFL, the event organizer said. Those are companies with nine-figure marketing budgets and boardrooms that scrutinize every line.

Clarion Events built the program around dealmaking. The summit featured more than 50 speakers, 15-plus sessions, and more than 100 pre-arranged brand-to-creator meetings across nine content tracks running in parallel. The pre-arranged meetings are the tell: brands came to sign creators, not to browse.

Clarion is the world’s largest privately owned event organizer, founded in 1947, with a portfolio of more than 125 events. That scale of operator does not build a two-day summit around a category it considers a fad.

The Half-Trillion Figure Needs A Caveat

The event’s own copy pushed a bigger projection. “Influencer marketing budgets are up 171% year over year, and the industry is projected to be worth $500 billion by 2030,” the Creator Economy Live East page states.

That $500 billion figure appears only in the organizer’s marketing language, with no independent source behind it. The widely cited projection from Goldman Sachs puts the creator economy at $480 billion by 2027, a different number over a different horizon. The two are not interchangeable, and the surge in CreatorIQ’s report stands on its own without the larger claim.

For creators weighing whether to chase brand deals or platform payouts, the reallocation is the durable signal. Money moving out of television does not tend to move back.

CreatorIQ publishes its report annually. The next edition will show whether 171% was a one-year repricing or the start of a longer climb.

Ahmad Muhammad

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