Yearly Trends in the Huberman Lab Podcast — Part 2
This article is the second in a series(first article) analyzing the trends of the Huberman Lab Podcast, and will focus on the podcast episodes published to YouTube in 2022. The analysis dives into what is behind the “hit” episodes vs the average episodes.
In 2022 Huberman Lab published 52 episodes with an average view per episode of 1.4 million(based on the data pulled in February 2024). The average viewership includes a few episodes with over 5 million views, though many episodes hover around the 500k mark.
What made certain episodes so popular?
With this question in mind I started to analyze if any patterns emerged with the different episodes based on their popularity of views and likes. I set thresholds to compare the High Views(at 2m) and the Highly Liked(1.8%). These were based on the main cluster that formed in the lower right representing the liked, but not viewed episodes which are the majority.
There were 9 episodes that achieved over 2 million views:
In reviewing the list of top viewed episodes, I would not say any particular patterns are obvious:
- 4 of the 9 are guest interviews, and the remaining 5 are lectures.
- The categories represent many of the common categories, with the most popular being 3 Fitness related episodes.
- The dates of the episodes are also distributed across the year.
- The most liked episodes are about Cannabis(2.33) and Alcohol(1.95).
To contrast this list I wanted to look at the bottom of the list in terms of views:
In this bottom 10 we can do a similar analysis for patterns that we did in the top 9.
- 7 of the 10 are guest interviews.
- The categories do seem to lean toward Mental Health(3) and Neuroscience(4).
- The dates are again evenly distributed.
- The like ratios for these episodes are relatively high, but we have seen that there is a relationship where the highly viewed episodes tend to have lower like ratios.
After reviewing the top performers and lower performers a hypothesis has started to emerge for me. I personally find the top episodes more enticing. The lower viewed set are less applicable to my own life. I am interested in exercise, meditation, and recently stopped using alcohol. In contrast I don’t use hypnosis, psychedelics and don’t consider myself aggressive.
My initial thought was this could be a demographics influence. I had heard of the “Huberman Husbands” characterization and wanted to understand if this was indicative of being a majority male population.
According to Similar Web, an advertising demographic website, the website HubermanLab.com gender demographics are pretty evenly distributed with the largest age group in 25–34.
A Reddit poll (very unscientific) of the gender put the membership of the sub-edit at ~76% male.
This was more inline with my expectations, but I didn’t feel any of this demographic information was a clear link to the topics and a much simpler hypothesis occurred to me… maybe these episodes just represent the trendier topics.
Using Google Trends I mapped out a few of the topics from the most popular and least popular episodes. It was clear that subject like the “Effect of Alcohol” and “Building Strength” are much more general interests that the very specific topics of “Hypnosis for Health” and “Psychedelics for Brain Rewiring”.
The conclusion I began to draw is that the popular episodes are not driven by a specific demographic’s interest, but are more general interesting to everyone. While Huberman Lab does seem to delve into some esoteric topics, it has enough general topics to interest the masses… and those are the hits.
I am left with the questions about the episode planning for the podcast. As the Huberman Lab team produces about 52 episodes a year, are they trying to make every episode a hit? Do they know that certain episodes will be more niche? Perhaps tapping into the most popular topics is hard to find the content for or maybe it is more principled in looking to provide a broad ranging set of topics?
Wrap Up
The Huberman Lab podcast continued its success in 2022 with 9 “hit” episodes and 41 that were average. At this point the “hits” appear to be tapping into general popularity and trends. I would love to understand the programming strategy and how the team considers its episodes. It seems like the team could anticipate which episodes are going to be average and appeal to a smaller niche.
In the next installment of this analysis I will be looking at 2023 to present episodes. To be notified about that article and future topics you can follow me on Medium at @gary.
Things to Know about this Data
- My analysis is based on YouTube data as of ~February 10th 2024. I do not have historical records of how the counts appeared at a set point in time (e.g. 1 month after airing), that might give a more equivalent evaluation.
- The chart has a blue line for views, red line for the like ratio and the bars indicate the category of the episodes (I would love feedback on alternative ways to visualize this)
- “Liked Percentage” is based on the number of likes divided by the number of views. I believe a single person can view an episode multiple times, but cannot like it multiple times.
- In general “Like Percentages” seem to be a single digit number. I think that is a reflection of how often viewers take the time to like videos.
- I used ChatGPT to summarize the episodes and provide the “Assigned Category” to create a grouping.
- The data I based my analysis on is here.
- An interactive version of the chart is here.
