Real Bodybuilding Podcast - the fan favourites
Bodybuilding is a really niche community. Lift heavy weights, eat chicken breast, get huge.
Arnold Schwarzenegger probably comes to mind when you think of bodybuilding. He brought it into popular culture through his Hollywood career and big biceps. In general though, not a lot is known about the industry - and there are many misconceptions.
In 2020 Fouad Abiad - a professional bodybuilder - decided to create a lens into the world of bodybuilding by starting a podcast on Youtube. Fouad shows the personality behind the muscles by chatting with other people in the industry. It's a mix of tips, comedy, and myth busting.
The podcast has grown in popularilty over time, expanding into more group discussions over direct 1 on 1 interviews. These group chats will usually include Fouad and 2 or 3 others (generally pro bodybuilders).
Let's look at viewership for all of the podcast episodes and try to determine who the fan favourites are.
Firstly, a simple viewcount would favour recent videos as the channel populatiry has grown. I normalize the views by dividing by the subscriber count at the time. We'll call it view score. So 50k views back when the channel was smaller has a higher view score than 50k views now.
There are over 500 videos on channel. About 160 of them are group podcasts. I determined this based on the video duration and having at least 2 guests. There were also some clear outliers to remove - such as the episode about Chris Bumstead - which has view score 6x the podcast average. This has less to do about the guests and more about CBum being the most popular bodybuilder in the world and a clickbait title.
Let's look at the overall guest breakdown. Each dot on the plot is an episode which the guest participated in. The higher the view score, the more successful the episode.
Iain, Guy, and Nick are the 3 most popular guests. Interestingly though in number 4 Paul Lauzon - who is actually not a pro bodybuilder but Fouad's best friend and pro judge.
At the bottom we have Justin and Roman. They both don't have quite as many episodes as the others, and aren't part of any extra succesful outlier episode (such as a viewscore greater than 0.8).
