The Big Pitch with Jimmy Carr ended on October 1^st, when the last of the 10 fortnightly episodes were released. So, how did it do?

Firstly, the platform chart in this statistics site states that Apple only has 14% of global listener market share, compared to YouTube’s 33%.

Apple

From the perspective of Apple Podcasts – really hard to tell without any viewing figures. There are lots of “podcast charts” websites but I’ve found that, if you click through one after another, they can differ wildly, even on the same day. This is even though they are supposedly all coming from the same data feed.

YouTube Numbers

The only place to see some actual numbers is the Netflix is a Joke playlist of videos (here). As YouTube get 33% of the worldwide podcast traffic it’s probably a good a yardstick as any.

• Episode 1 launched May 28^th 2025
• Episode 10 launched Oct 1^st 2025
• As of today (October 21^st 2025) the 10 have collectively amassed 355,054 views

Other Podcasts?

How does this YT viewing rate compare to other podcasts?

It’s estimated there are over 4.5m podcasts in the world and 1 in 3 of all listeners do so though YouTube (the 33% – duh!). It’s a REALLY crowded market and it takes a lot of work to muscle in on the Rogan’s of this world. Not that anyone could get remotely close to Joe’s numbers.

I looked at a random handful (from the UK) that regularly feature in the Top 20 / launched this year or are hosted by comedians.

Some I couldn’t include (Russell Howard’s Five Brilliant Things, for example) because, in their channel, the podcast content was mixed in within their stand-up videos.

And it’s a bit hard to do an exact like-4-like exact comparison of number of episodes because (with Making a Scene for example) there’s often a mix in there of full episodes and shorter clips. The “Views” in this table are therefore for the full channel.

The table below isn’t perfect – but it gives us an idea of how the Big Pitch performed.

Effort / Expenditure?

So, I thought about it in terms of effort, from the perspective of how much of the week is this taking up? Is it now virtually your full-time job? How much did the recording cost?

The Big Pitch looks like Netflix / BBC did all the background work (booking comics / studio etc.) and then they shoe horned a couple of days into Jimmy’s schedule and hammered them all out in one go (and then drop fed them once a fortnight).

Wanging On has a slightly lower viewing average (than the Big Pitch) and yet has taken 75 videos to get there, across 7 months of effort. With subs of 17,400 are they covering their outlay?

With Making a Scene the top 8 videos (if you look here and sort on Popular) have decent numbers (top 1 is currently 168k) but then we drop down into the 50-60k views banding. I would imagine they are doing it because they enjoy it – but that’s a lot of outlay when you think about the costs of the Studio, camera team, editing and publishing. Is the YT income from 49k subscribers covering the outlay?

To give an idea of their output The Rest is Entertainment has published 8 new episodes in the last 2 weeks and a lot of research / phone call to industry mates go into that show. Again, with 120k subscribers, how good is the ROI?

Compare these subscriber numbers to Jimmy’s stand up / TV clips material currently having just short of 1.7m subs, across his 3 channels.

Will The Big Pitch get a 2^nd series?

Well, it won an award (here) and I would imagine how enthusiastic Netflix / BBC are depends on how much it cost to make. It certainly got a decent enough number of viewers, when you compare it to the above.

From Jimmy’s perspective – this looks like he’s added another string to his bow. A different style of “TV show” and another move away from terrestrial TV and in the direction of streaming.

I’ll keep an eye out for an announcement!