YouTube Viewership Highlights Crossroads For Howard Stern Show
Stunningly, The Howard Stern Show will be cancelled, after decades of the original “shock jock” hosting what became a model for an entire industry – and then later another, with podcasting taking cues from him as well.
Data from Tubular Labs tells the story of how we got here, and maybe even how the show could have wound up on the chopping block for SiriusXM (beyond Stern’s contract, of course). And it starts with social video.
Declining YouTube Audience
Since last June, unique U.S. viewers for Stern’s YouTube page have declined 31%, from 4.5 million to 3.1 million.
The Howard Stern Show was No. 96 in June by U.S. audience reach among domestic entertainment, film & movie media pages; drawing fewer viewers than Complex and Pawn Stars, but just more than FailArmy and Variety.
Stern’s U.S. watch-time has declined 31% as well over the last year, from 31.4 million minutes in June 2024 to 21.7 million in June 2025 – putting him at No. 153 among U.S. entertainment, film & movie media pages (more than Good Morning Morning AMerica).
In June, 39% of Stern’s U.S. YouTube viewers were over 45 years old; 84% were men over 13.
Limited Virality
Over the past year, just four videos uploaded to Stern’s YouTube page topped 1.5 million views, and none had more than 2.8 million (that was a live performance by Lady Gaga that potentially had crossover outside of his typical audience).
Unlike other entities, the Howard Stern Show doesn’t really embrace Shorts – just 13% of uploads over the last year were under one minute long, and only 18% were actually Shorts vertical videos (the preferred format of many YouTube users today).
The show also didn’t seem to embrace shorter or longer content fully: Just four videos were longer than 20 minutes (including a two-hour interview with Bruce Springsteen and a one-hour pre-election upload with Kamala Harris).
However, 95% of videos were fewer than five minutes long, playing into a cultural shift toward shorter viewing.
Where that struggles, potentially, is against podcasts and similar radio shows, which are now uploading full episodes to YouTube and enticing TV-based viewing (much like Stern’s show long did).
What Else Is Stern’s Audience Watching?
Using Tubular’s relevance score (right-sizing between audience overlap and affinity – how much more likely they are to watch a channel than the average viewer), Howard Stern viewers are most likely to be watching late-night shows and/or Conan O’Brien.
Interestingly, most of these are competitors to Stern’s approach, but also a case study in the best ways for these similar channels to use social video:
SNL and the other late-night programming here simply upload segments from the show the next day for YouTube viewers to consume (even if they’re not watching live on TV).
Letterman and Conan are pushing shorter snippets and promos to get people tuned into longer-form content.
Both strategies are playing into how younger audiences watch videos (something Stern’s show was doing with snippets, even if not embracing Shorts).
This data doesn’t spell doom for Stern in any way. Rather, it just informs how SiriusXM starts to evaluate his contract relative to what they get out of the show — and the areas where a post-SiriusXM Stern show may find new growth opportunities as well.
In an environment where podcast episodes on YouTube, stylized in part as successor’s to Stern’s show, become increasingly larger parts of the TV-watching ecosystem, there’s certainly an appetite for Stern. The program just may need a new approach that looks similar to its old one.
