Alex Cooper, host of “Call Her Daddy,” is one of the highest-paid podcast hosts, and her show is platformed on SiriusXM.
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Three of the 20 highest-paid podcasters are on SiriusXM, according to the new Forbes list of “The Highest-Paid Podcasters Of 2026.” The list includes SmartLess’s Will Arnett, Jason Bateman and Sean Hayes; motivational speaker Mel Robbins; and Call Her Daddy’s Alex Cooper, all of whom have signed with the satellite service within the past two years for at least $32 million.
It follows, then, that these are three of the most successful podcasters at pulling in listeners and stoking subscriptions because companies as big as SiriusXM won’t pay for nothing. The ability to pay that type of salary indicates an eye to the future and also surprising influence, as all those hosts could have chosen a different platform.
Instead, they went with SiriusXM, which has seen a recent small resurgence in subscribers that also reflects its historically low churn rates.
Satellite Radio’s Decline Has Been Greatly Exaggerated
This recent success and the ability to sign such big names counteracts a narrative that’s been around for decades: The imminent decline of satellite radio. People have been declaring the medium dead almost since it launched, including Time declaring it one of the 10 biggest tech failures of the past decade in 2009 and Datamation giving it last rites around the same time.
Both cited the expensive, limited technology as a problem. Maintaining, building, and launching actual satellites into orbit is an incredibly capital-intensive method of data delivery compared to cloud internet hosting. Indeed, the startup costs were so intense they led in part to the merger of Sirius Satellite Radio and XM Satellite Radio into SiriusXM in 2008.
More recently, satellite has been dismissed for other reasons. Car manufacturers increasingly favor wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, reducing reliance on factory-installed satellite receivers. To maintain its massive user base, SiriusXM has resorted to deep subscription discounts, sometimes dropping prices to just a few dollars a month—which then sparked the churn issues for a while, when prices popped back up.
But SiriusXM has fought through all this, and emerged successful enough to draw in top podcasters like the SmartLess crew, Cooper and Robbins. Additionally, it is the longtime home of Howard Stern, still one of the most recognizable voices on the radio, even if his star power has dimmed a bit over the years.
At this point, satellite radio has found its niche, and that is what has led to the steadying of the subscriber base. People who want these podcasters’ content early and without ads have helped that stabilization. And their success is an indicator of perhaps a sunnier outlook for what now looks like more and more of a legacy platform.