Rumble, a growing tech company founded as a YouTube alternative, is expanding its services to compete with major tech giants like Amazon Web Services and Twitch, offering a platform for video sharing, live streaming, and cloud services. Initially, it gained traction as a platform for small creators battling with rights management and monetization issues on YouTube. However, by 2020, it had attracted a significant number of conservative users displeased with perceived censorship on platforms like YouTube, leading to an explosion in its user base as it became a hub for conservative commentators.

The company saw its valuation skyrocket from $500 million to over $3 billion, with notable financial backing from figures like Peter Thiel and a recent $775 million investment from cryptocurrency company Tether. This cash influx will support Rumble’s balance sheet and strategy of securing exclusive content deals. J.D. Vance, the Vice President elect, played a critical role in the company's early financial growth through Narya Capital. Despite its popularity, Rumble faces financial sustainability challenges as its revenue figures struggle to match its spending rate.

Main takeaways from the video:

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Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. deluge [ˈdɛljuːdʒ] - (noun) - A great flood or an overwhelming amount of something. - Synonyms: (flood, torrent, inundation)

And that quickly started this deluge of conservatives that were aggrieved with one way or another, with YouTube all moving over to Rumble.

2. monetize [ˈmʌnɪˌtaɪz] - (verb) - To convert something into money or a source of profit. - Synonyms: (capitalize, commercialize, profit)

It's a place where people can post videos, livestream themselves, and it's a growing tech company.

3. ideological [ˌaɪdiəˈlɑːdʒɪkl] - (adjective) - Based on or relating to a system of ideas and ideals, especially concerning economic or political theory and policy. - Synonyms: (doctrinal, philosophical, theoretical)

They presented it as an ideological good fit.

4. antitrust [ˌæntiˈtrʌst] - (adjective) - Relating to legislation preventing or controlling monopolies with the intention of promoting competition in business. - Synonyms: (competition law, monopoly regulation, fair trade)

They have a big antitrust suit against Google that's supposed to go to trial in 2025.

5. valuation [ˌvæljuˈeɪʃən] - (noun) - An estimation of something's worth, especially one carried out by a professional appraiser. - Synonyms: (appraisal, assessment, evaluation)

But that was $25 million at a valuation of about $500 million

6. restitution [ˌrɛstɪˈt(j)uːʃən] - (noun) - Restoration of something lost or stolen to its proper owner. - Synonyms: (compensation, reimbursement, reparation)

They are seeking restitution and damages against the company.

7. stake [steɪk] - (noun) - A share or interest in a business or endeavor. - Synonyms: (interest, share, equity)

So that combined stake was over $1 billion just in and of itself.

8. divested [daɪˈvɛstɪd] - (verb) - To rid oneself of something that one no longer wants or requires, such as a business interest or investment. - Synonyms: (sold off, disposed of, relinquished)

And when he ran for Senate he divested himself from and when he won his Senate seat, I should say he divested himself from Narya.

9. lucrative [ˈluːkrətɪv] - (adjective) - Producing a great deal of profit. - Synonyms: (profitable, remunerative, rewarding)

We're going to sign these very lucrative deals with all sorts of people to make Rumble their platform.

10. cap [kæp] - (noun) - A maximum limit on an amount or value. - Synonyms: (limit, ceiling, restriction)

Today their market cap is over $3 billion.

How Chris Pavlovski Founder Of Rumble Reached Billionaire Status

Hi everybody, I'm Brittany Lewis, a breaking news reporter here at Forbes. Joining me now is my Forbes colleague, money and politics reporter Kyle Kahn Mullins. Kyle, thanks so much for joining me. Always great to be here, Brittany, thanks for having me.

It is always great to have you. And you are kicking off the year with some new reporting about Rumble and its founder and CEO. So as we dive into the conversation today, first give us a little bit brief history of what is the YouTube alternative Rumble. So Rumble is, like you said, first and foremost a YouTube alternative. It's a place where people can post videos, livestream themselves, and it's a growing tech company. I think that they would tell you they are also an alternative to other companies. For example, an alternative to Twitch, which is owned by Amazon. That's one of the biggest live streaming platforms on the Internet other than YouTube. They would say they're an alternative to Twitch. They would also say they're an alternative to Amazon Web services. AWS is the biggest services provider on the Internet and Rumble now has its own cloud service.

So they would say, look, we are the founder, Chris Pavloski, he described it as a mini Google. Now, they don't have a search engine, but other than that, they are trying to be kind of a one stop shop for lots of different things across the Internet. It's a growing tech company, it's more than a decade old. But talk to us a little bit about how it has gained prominence. It was started initially as a YouTube alternative that would help small creators who struggled with things like rights, like, like rights management on the platform and with, with monetizing themselves on the platform. Because YouTube's tools, especially in the early 2010s, weren't that great about this. They made a lot of improvements and changes since then. But Rumble really presented itself as like, look, we're really good if you're a small creator just trying to get started on the Internet and we can help you license out your content to other websites. And YouTube didn't really have any of that machinery way back in the day when it was founded.

Forward though to 2020. And a couple of conservatives, prominent conservatives, including Republican congressman at the time, Devin Nunes. He's now the CEO of Truth Social. Devin Nunes was skeptical because he thought that he was being censored on it. He was being shadow banned and being suppressed on the platform. So he got in touch with Rumble and he said, what if I just started moving all of my video content over my, my podcast and the stuff that my office is posting? What if I moved it all over to Rumble and Rumble said, sure. And that quickly started this deluge of conservatives that were aggrieved with one way or another, with YouTube all moving over to Rumble.

And so Rumble saw its monthly active users explode during 2020. They went from about 1 million users in the second quarter to 20 million users by the fourth quarter. And you started to see their tilt show up. You started to see talking about election anomalies and tabulating vote counts in Pennsylvania. And this was around the time that Donald Trump was promoting the idea that he'd stolen that Joe Biden had stolen the election in 2020. So that's when you start to see this shift, and that's when Rumble really starts to become prominent on the bright side of the political spectrum.

It's really interesting. It started as a place for smaller creators because now there are huge names in politics, especially right famous right figures. Who are they and who are some of the other apolitical figures on Rumble as well? Yeah, I think it's important to Note you'll see YouTube or you'll see Rumble referred to a lot of as like a right wing YouTube. I think we even called it that a couple of times in our story. That's not always. That's not 100% of what they are, but they are very prominent. They have a lot of very big conservative commentators. People like Dan Bongino, who's actually also an investor in Rumble, people like Donald Trump Jr. Kimberly Guilfoyle, Steve Bannon.

These folks are really making a living on Rumble as conservative commentators. But there's also very apolitical stuff on there. Rumble has really tried to expand beyond just politics and news. So if you go on Rumble, you'll see gaming streamers and video game content. You'll see sports stuff. They have a partnership with a combat sports league called Power Slap, which is a kind of a wwe, but it's focused entirely on slapping. They recently signed a deal with Barstool Sports. Dave Portnoy, Barstool Sports that's a pretty apolitical site. So overall, I would say you have this platform that is trying to expand outside of this conservative niche that made it popular in the first place.

I want to talk a little bit about money now. Can you talk to us about how Rumble's worth ballooned since it was founded over a decade ago and how much cash has it raised in the past 11 years? So we can track the value of Rumble going up over several different fundraising rounds. Right. Its first big injection of Cash was in 2021. Was a venture capital investment that I think we're going to talk a little bit more about. But that was $25 million at a valuation of about $500 million. That was already a big jump. Right. This is after Rumble's viewership has soared during the 2020 pandemic election, all that stuff.

Fast forward about a year and Rumble goes public via a SPAC deal. They now have 300 million plus dollars in cash in their bank account and they were worth upwards of $2 billion. Today their market cap is over $3 billion. So you can really track the valuation going up. And then addition they just had this big deal with Tether that valued the company that was injected with $775 million investment into the company, including a little over $200 million in cash. So that's going to help stabilize their balance sheet a little bit, which I know we're going to talk about as well.

I know you hinted at it in your comment before, but can you talk to us a little bit about J.D. vance's, the Vice President elect, his involvement in Rumble? How did that happen? Absolutely. That first $25 million, that money which gave Rumble the ability to open a new headquarters, it gave them the ability to buy up a couple of smaller tech companies and incorporate their stuff into their platform. That money came from Narya, which is a venture capital firm that was co founded by J.D. Vance. And J.D. Vance did this with the financial support from Peter Thiel, right wing billionaire, got his money from PayPal originally.

And so JD Vance is really tied up in the beginnings of Rumble as a bigger company. He was reportedly a pretty big figure in the original in that deal between Narya and Rumble. And he, you know, afterwards he continued to manage that relationship up until he ran for Senate. And when he ran for Senate he divested himself from and when he won his Senate seat, I should say he divested himself from Narya. He's no longer at the firm, does still own part of Narya or part of their investment fund. So through that likely owns a stake in Rumble.

However, it's kind of like owning an ETF at this point. You just have any control over what it Rumble has no problem spending cash. You reported that pretty clearly. You see that in their high profile deals with the creators on there and you have this chart in your reporting about Rumble's spending versus their revenue and there is a pretty big separation there in that graph. But despite its popularity, you report reported last month that 2025 this year will likely be a do or die year for Rumble. Talk to us about that.

Yeah. So you can see after Rumble goes public via that SPAC deal in late 2022, their strategy, they had all this cash, over $300 million in cash. And so they said, our strategy is basically going to be we're going to sign these very lucrative deals with all sorts of people to make Rumble their platform. And so regardless of whether they're getting fewer views than they were on YouTube or whether you know what metrics they're hitting, we're going to guarantee that they're going to make a certain amount of money. Now, we don't know exactly what all these deals look like. They don't disclose any of this.

So we don't know how much they were paying Donald Trump Jr. To be on the platform. Kimberly Guilfoyle, Dan Bongino, Steven Crowder, all these conservative commentators or the gaming and sports creators that they've also signed these big deals with. However, we do know based on their public SEC filings, that the cash was going out the door at an unsustainable rate. They burned through about two thirds of that cash in two years. So by the end of 2024, they had burned over, burned through nearly $200 million. And that was actually just by the third quarter of 2024. So we don't even know the numbers for the last quarter.

And so they were kind of in a situation where they had about 100 million, little over $100 million left. What were they going to do next? Because their revenues were, were not keeping up with their expenses. They were shoveling money out the door. But it wasn't showing up in the revenue figures and it wasn't showing up in the user figures either. And so that's why 2025 was going to be this do or die moment for Rumble. And so we published the story showing this. You can see it in the chart there they were actually. Their net losses every month or every quarter were larger than their net, were larger than the revenues. Excuse me.

And then they were saved. And then they were saved. Almost a Christmas miracle for Rumble. At the end of December there, they received a huge investment to the tune of $775 million. Talk to us about this cash infusion. Where did it come from? The cash infusion came from Tether. Tether is this big crypto company. They are known most for operating the most commonly used stablecoin. It's a cryptocurrency that's tied very, very closely to the US Dollar. The whole point is that one unit of its stablecoin is US$1. So they're a very big crypto company, and they plowed a bunch of money into Rumble.

About a third of that money is going to be used just to stabilize Rumble's balance sheet. So they now have several hundred million more dollars to use to continue to sign these very lucrative deals, trying to get those user figures up, those revenue numbers up. But the rest of it is going to be used to buy back a huge chunk of their stock. And so they're going to reward investors for doing, for. For being a part of the company. Kyle, is there any indication of why Tether, a cryptocurrency company, would invest so much money into Rumble?

They presented it as an ideological good fit. So in the statement that went out accompanying the deal, the head of Tether said, look, I have a quote here. You know, we want to promote freedom and we want to. We want to challenge existing centralized systems. And that's what cryptocurrency is doing in the financial space, right? They see themselves as challenging big players in the financial industry. On Wall street, you know, the big. The big established bank, the Federal Reserve, the US Dollar, they're trying to take all of that down, or they're trying to, you know, challenge those companies into working and operating differently. Rumble sees itself in a similar way. They're trying to challenge big tech companies due to AWS Twitch, they're trying to challenge them to operate in a different way as well. And so these companies, they say, like, we're for freedom of expression, we're freedom of speech, we're for decentralizing things.

So the way they present it is it's an ideological good fit. And this $775 million investment was not only good news for Rumble, it was really good news for Rumble's founder and CEO, Chris Pavlovsky. Who is he? Yeah, Chris Pavlovski got a little bit, like you said, a little bit of Christmas, big Christmas gift over the holidays. Chris Pavlovski, he found, like you said, founder of Rumble, son of Macedonian immigrants who immigrated to Canada. He grew up on the Internet. He's an early Internet entrepreneur. He was building websites in his teen years, which was right around the dot com bubble.

His first couple big successes, he had a company called Jokearoo, which was a kind of similar to early Rumble, actually. People would upload these spammy, funny videos, and he would enable them to license that out to other media outlets that wanted to play those videos. And he also founded this company called Cosmic Development, which used his ties back to his parents Home country of Macedonia. And it's an IT outsourcing firm essentially so tech companies in the US, in Canada can hire Cosmic Development and they'll help with their IT needs. They've got offices in North Macedonia and in Serbia. And so that's one of. That was one of his first big companies. They're also, they work with Rumble. Rumble is one of their big clients. And then he founded Rumble and he's been kind of on this train ever since.

And you're reporting he is now a billionaire. How so? Yeah, after Tether put all this money into Rumble Rumble stock price exploded. It more than doubled in just a couple of days at the very end of December. And after Christmas it peaked at around $16 a share. It's a little bit below that now. But that pushed Pavlovsky's stake in Rumble. He owns about 25% of the company and he also owns options to acquire even more of the company. So that combined stake was over $1 billion just in and of itself. So putting aside his stake in Cosmic Development, putting aside his other work and any real estate and other assets that he owns, his stake in Rubble alone was worth more $1.3 billion at the time.

Come January 20, as we know, we will have a Republican controlled House, Senate and White House. And that sounds like that would be good news for a company like Rumble, which has been touted and described as a right wing YouTube. So what's next for Pavlovsky and Rumble in 2025? So they have a couple of things coming in 2025. First thing, like you said, is they are going to have a friendly government administration and ideologically, you know, compatico government administration for the first time since they went public. Right. They've been, they've only been public under the Biden administration so far.

And the Biden administration has historically taken a little bit less friendly of a view toward very, very conservative commentators like, like the ones that are popular on Rumble's platform. But that said, you know, they've also got some other stuff coming up. They have a big antitrust suit against Google that's supposed to go to trial in 2025. That's. So that's coming up. They think Rumble would say that their business has been really hurt by, by various anti competitive practices by Google. Google denies this, of course, and so they are seeking restitution and damages against the company. And that's, that's another really big piece of their strategy is they're trying to take down big tech, not just by out competing them but also by suing. So we'll see what happens there.

Kyle, an exciting year ahead. Thank you so much for your reporting. I look forward to many conversations in2025. Absolutely. Happy New Year, Brittany. Great to be here.

TECHNOLOGY, ECONOMICS, POLITICS, RUMBLE, VIDEO SHARING, INVESTMENT, FORBES