The power of Darknet Diaries

Darknet Diaries is an excellent podcast presented by Jack Rhysider. Each episode tells a true, compelling and often alarming, story about cybercrime or cybersecurity. It’s a great listen, which I thoroughly recommend.

In 2021, this podcast was downloaded a staggering 22,904,867 times. From a marketing perspective, Darknet Diaries is hugely important to the cybersecurity profession because thousands of CISOs, network security engineers, developers, etc. tune in.

Each episode is ‘supported’ by a couple of commercial sponsors and the beauty of this format is that Jack, himself, explains the sponsor’s products/service and the problems they solve, giving the impression that he’s actually endorsing them. If it’s good enough for Jack then it’s good enough for you!

Episode 125, ‘Jeremiah’, is sponsored by the cybersecurity asset management company, Axonius and the developer security platform, Snyk. The marketing teams at Axonius and Snyk have clearly done their homework on who this podcast reaches and where.

Our data suggests that it reaches thousands of CISOs in many different countries. It's most popular in English speaking countries, but it’s also popular in some countries where English is not the first language.

Not only is it popular amongst CISOs, it’s also listened to in large numbers by other job roles such as Developers, Devops, Network Admins, System Admins and, of course, security specialists.

It’s a powerful media cocktail: entertaining and educational (I’ve learned a lot from these podcasts) stories and a likeable and knowledgeable host. Plus, it happens to be popular amongst a set of job roles that are often tough to reach.