Billionaire Oprah Winfrey launched “The Oprah Podcast,” a fairly late addition into the podcast wars, and an addition to her traditional media empire.
Key facts
- Winfrey’s announcement of the new podcast creates an outlet for hosting weekly interviews and a recurring monthly interview in partnership with Starbucks (where episodes are filmed inside Starbucks shops alongside products) with an author for Oprah’s “Book Club,” according to a Tuesday press release.
- The show will launch with an interview with award-winning Irish author Claire Keegan, and the channel already had more than 39,000 subscribers shortly after launch.
- Winfrey also films an interview series called “Oprah’s Super Soul” on the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN), which has run for more than 530 episodes and features high-profile interviews with people like Jimmy Kimmel and Malala Yousafzai.
- Winfrey launched OWN in 2011 with Warner Bros. Discovery after nearly three decades of hosting her massively popular TV talk show—which created the cash profits that put her into billionaire territory—and swapped half of her 50% stake in OWN in 2020 for Warner Bros. Discovery shares.
Key background
Winfrey has continued to grow her brand after decades. Oprah.com—Winfrey’s website that houses OWN content—“averages 43 million page views, 6.5 million unique users per month and has close to 7 million members,” according to press materials. Episodes of Oprah’s “Super Soul Sunday” reach thousands of viewers on YouTube alone. Throughout the 2024 election, her brand helped garner thousands of views for a nearly 90-minute interview with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. As Winfrey pivots to YouTube, she’s entering the increasingly competitive world of podcasts. Edison Research from October reports that in 2024, YouTube beat Spotify and Apple Podcasts as the go-to source for 31% of weekly podcast listeners. The popularity was also evident from the 2024 election, where podcast interviews with presidential candidates garnered hundreds of millions of views in total. President-elect Donald Trump is credited with a strategy that reached more than 50 million viewers through his interview with Joe Rogan alone.
Forbes valuation
Winfrey is worth an estimated $3 billion, making her one of the wealthiest self-made women in the world. Forbes also follows her large real estate portfolio, worth millions.
Surprising fact
Winfrey originally partnered with Starbucks to promote reading and funding for literacy programs in the 1990s.
