What Joe Rogan Lost for $100M

“If you choose to go exclusive on Spotify, you’re essentially saying to 70% of your existing and potential audience, ‘Sorry, you can’t listen anymore.’” Oscar Merry watched Joe Rogan lose influence despite a $100 million payday—and built Fountain to prove there’s a better way.

In the current system, as an artist, as a content creator, you are losing out massively on both time and money.

— Oscar Merry

Timestamps

  • 01:08 Oscar's origin story: #1 Alexa skill to questioning Big Tech control
  • 09:56 Why podcasting's fragmented ecosystem resists centralization
  • 11:32 The Joe Rogan case study: $200M couldn't buy back lost influence
  • 17:14 Why value for value can work when only 1-5% participate
  • 26:10 What Fountain learned from listen-to-earn rewards
  • 31:14 Money flow comparison: legacy media vs open payments
  • 38:44 Attention algorithms vs value-based content discovery
  • 47:43 Nostr's magic: comments that appear across every app
  • 51:22 What censorship resistance actually means in practice
  • 53:33 Building a business on unproven protocols
  • 1:00:25 First moves for creators exploring open podcasting
  • 1:03:18 The Fountain pitch: why switch from Spotify or Apple

Resources

Oscar Merry

About Oscar Merry

Oscar Merry is CEO and co-founder of Fountain, a podcast app built on open protocols including Bitcoin Lightning and Nostr. Before podcasting, he was an Amazon Alexa Champion who built skills used by millions, ran the London Alexa Meetup, and taught voice technology courses. He pivoted to audio after recognizing that voice assistants couldn't escape Big Tech gatekeeping. Based in the UK, he leads a small team building what he calls “a different way of doing content discovery on the internet."

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