The Diary Of A CEO Hits 21.3M YouTube Subscribers

Illustration by Pop Culture Pit

The Lowdown

The Diary Of A CEO just put out a victory lap. FlightStory, the company that makes Steven Bartlett’s show, announced on Monday that it’s now the most-subscribed podcast on YouTube’s podcast charts, with 21.3 million subscribers as of Nov. 1 (FlightStory). That’s a long way from where it started: a guy in his Manchester bedroom, a cheap microphone, a sock as a pop filter, and about 40 listeners, most of them his friends (FlightStory).

Key Takeaways

FlightStory says The Diary Of A CEO is the most-subscribed show on YouTube’s podcast charts, at 21.3 million subscribers on Nov. 1 (FlightStory).
The comparison is the company’s own, based on public subscriber counts. It isn’t a ranking YouTube announced (FlightStory) (BusinessCloud).
The company says the channel topped 1 billion YouTube views from January through October 2026, up from about 399 million in the same stretch of 2025 (FlightStory).
Almost a quarter of this year’s views, about 261 million, came from dubbed audio tracks in other languages (FlightStory).

How a Bedroom Diary Got This Big

Bartlett started recording in 2017, talking about his own experience building a business. It turned into an interview show, and in 2020 it started posting full video episodes on YouTube every week, which Bartlett’s team calls a pandemic passion project (FlightStory).

The guest list has gotten a lot bigger since then. The release name-checks Michelle Obama, Kamala Harris, Jada Pinkett Smith, Mel Robbins, Matthew McConaughey, MrBeast and JD Vance. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy sat down for an episode released Oct. 22, recorded in Ukrainian with two interpreters, and FlightStory says it passed 7 million views in 10 days (FlightStory).

The international angle is the quiet engine here. The show now dubs episodes into more than 20 languages with AI voice tech, and the company says Spanish, Russian, German, Portuguese and French lead the non-English listening (FlightStory).

“When I started The Diary Of A CEO, I was sitting in my bedroom in Manchester, recording into a microphone. About 40 people listened to those first episodes. It’s quite difficult to comprehend where it’s got to today,” Bartlett said in the release (FlightStory).

Our Take: Big Number, Narrow Crown

The growth is real and it’s wild. Going from roughly 399 million views to over a billion in a year is the kind of jump most YouTubers dream about, and the dubbing play is smart. A quarter of your audience listening in another language is a huge moat.

But read the fine print on the crown. “Most-subscribed on YouTube’s podcast charts” is the company’s own comparison, built from subscriber counts it checked itself. It’s not YouTube saying the show is No. 1, and subscribers aren’t the same as people actually watching. For what it’s worth, the show does have outside wins to point to, like a No. 2 spot in Spotify’s 2025 Wrapped podcast list and a 2026 Webby (FlightStory). So yes, it’s huge. It’s just a press release doing what press releases do.

The Background

Bartlett is a British entrepreneur and investor, and FlightStory is the company behind the show. Beyond its own subscriber math, the release also lists the podcast at No. 1 by average audience per episode in Podscribe’s rankings for March and July 2026, plus Best Business & Finance Podcast at the 2026 iHeartPodcast Awards (FlightStory).