Rumble is an online video platform, web hosting and cloud services business headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, with its U.S. headquarters in Longboat Key, Florida. It was founded in October 2013 by Chris Pavlovski, a Canadian technology entrepreneur. The cloud services business hosts Truth Social, and the video platform is popular among American right and far-right users. The platform has been described as “alt-tech“.
| URL | rumble.com |
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History
Rumble was founded in late 2013 by Chris Pavlovski as an alternative to YouTube for independent content creators. Pavlovski founded the platform after seeing that Google was prioritizing influencers on YouTube and not small content creators. In its early years, content on Rumble largely consisted of viral videos and news from mainstream media sources as well as videos of children and animals. The platform received a large influx of viewership beginning during the COVID-19 pandemic, with monthly visitors rising from 1.6 million in 2020 to 31.9 million by 2021. In the first nine months of 2021, Rumble generated more than $6.5 million in revenue, mostly from advertisements, but was not profitable.
Rise of viewership in 2020 has been attributed to Representative Devin Nunes, who accused YouTube of overly censoring his channel. Nunes began posting content on the platform with other prominent conservatives, such as Dinesh D’Souza, Dan Bongino, Sean Hannity, and Representative Jim Jordan, following soon after. On January 11, 2021, Rumble filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google over its search results, seeking damages exceeding $2 billion. Rumble alleged that Google manipulates its algorithm so as to favor Google’s YouTube over Rumble in Google search results. It also alleges that this reduces its viewership and results in lower advertising revenues. As of August 2022, the case was ongoing.
Rumble received investment from venture capitalists Peter Thiel and J. D. Vance in May 2021, with that round of funding valuing Rumble at around $500 million. A month later, US President Donald Trump joined Rumble in preparation for recording his Ohio campaign rally.[18] In October 2021, Rumble acquired Locals. On December 14, 2021, Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) announced that it entered a “wide-ranging technology and cloud services agreement” with Rumble in a statement which also stated that Rumble would operate part of Truth Social as well as TMTG. Also in December 2021, Rumble challenged a New York law prohibiting hate speech on social media.
In August 2022, Rumble announced plans to provide an online advertising platform known as Rumble Ads, with Truth Social as its first publisher. Rumble became a publicly traded company in September 2022, trading on NASDAQ, after merging with a special-purpose acquisition company.
In May 2023, Rumble acquired the podcasting platform CallIn.
Design and restrictions
Rumble promotes itself as being “immune to cancel culture“. Along with four other tabs in its main interface, Rumble features “recommended channels” to follow and an “Earnings” tab in its interface. Rumble also allows its users to generate revenue from their videos. Users upload videos that are licensed to Rumble’s partners, such as Yahoo! and Microsoft News, after which money made from those videos is directly deposited into the Rumble account of the user.
According to the platform’s terms and conditions, Rumble forbids pornography, harassment, racism, antisemitism, and copyright infringement. The platform also prohibits illegal content. Rumble’s policies have drawn criticism from alt-tech platforms for not allowing anti-semitism and racism. Since November 2022, Rumble is blocked in France, after they refused to comply with the country’s demand for the site to remove Russian state media accounts.
Rumble has built its own cloud service infrastructure and video streaming capacity.
Users and content
Rumble’s video platform is popular among conservatives and far-right users and has been described as part of “alt-tech” by various observers.
Using data from February 2021, researchers noted that several content creators have gained a receptive audience on Rumble after their productions have been pulled from YouTube or Facebook. They include Del Bigtree, Sherri Tenpenny, and Simone Gold. According to a June 2021 article from Slate, “Pavlovski has recently become more outspoken in accusing Big Tech of censorship and now actively courts prominent conservatives and intellectual dark web figures to join Rumble.” It also hosts Truth Social. In August 2021, Rumble reached agreements with former Democratic Representative Tulsi Gabbard and The Intercept founder Glenn Greenwald to start posting their videos to the site.
As of August 15, 2022, Rumble reported 78 million monthly active users (MAU). That month, after being banned from most other platforms for hate speech and harmful conduct, kickboxer and social media personality Andrew Tate began posting on Rumble. Tate’s move coincided with a significant increase in downloads of the Rumble app.
According to an August 2022 Reuters article, Rumble is a better-funded and more mainstream direct competitor to video-hosting site BitChute and Odysee, as all three include misinformation and conspiracy theories, with Rumble moderating more content. Unlike BitChute and Odysee, Rumble does suppress results when searching for some keywords associated with hate speech or extremism, although the content itself is still accessible.
According to a May 2022 Pew Research Center study, 20 percent of American adults have heard of Rumble, while only 2 percent regularly get their news from Rumble. Of the 2 percent, 76 percent identify as Republicans or are Republican-leaning, while only 22 percent identify as Democrats or are Democratic-leaning. Most consumers of news from Rumble report positive experiences from their use of Rumble. Most of Rumble’s 200 most prominent accounts are run by individuals, 22 percent of whom have been banned from other social media platforms. However, 55 percent of these prominent accounts have accounts on other websites, with most of these accounts being on more established social media platforms, such as YouTube. A previous June 2022 review of posts from Rumble’s 200 most prominent accounts found that 49 percent had posted about guns or gun rights, 48 percent had posted about abortion, 44 percent had posted about LGBT topics, 42 percent had posted about the January 6 Capitol attack, and 26 percent had posted about vaccines.
