Welcome, welcome, welcome. We have a specialty episode of the Mac Hor Show. I know many of you tuning in in the morning at the crack of dawn, but here we're doing a little bit of a show at dusk. And honestly, I have the privilege to be sitting down with the founder, CEO, and chairman, Mr. Chris Pavlovski of Rumble. I appreciate you taking the time to chat with me, to chat with all the supporters of Rumble and I think we're going to have a great conversation of not just how Rumble did in 2025, but really where we're looking forward to in 2026. So, once again, thank you for taking the time out of your very busy schedule.
Thanks for having me. Glad to have you back up in the north. Yeah, beautiful Toronto. You know, I think I actually brought some of the cold weather with me, but maybe next time it'll be a bit warmer. Yeah, I know, I do prefer being in Sarasota, but we're here in Toronto and we'll enjoy it as much as we can. But, thanks for coming by. Happy to.
I kind of want to get this conversation going with what you were saying a little bit earlier today on your official earnings call of growth is back. Can you highlight to me and to everyone tuning in the major growth factors that you're personally excited about focusing on and that maybe we could spend a bit more time than just that quick call and really dive into the details there.
Yeah, well, let's start with Rumble shorts. The last couple weeks I've been at my desk refreshing shorts. We're seeing numbers like, 'Whoa, what's going on?' It keeps going and we're looking for that ceiling. It's been phenomenal in the last month, growth we haven't seen on the platform in quite some time. Every day this week we did a million unique video views. Our algorithm is not even great yet, we're making tweaks every week. Meanwhile, we broke concurrent streamers at a new high peak in the last 10 days, more than 2024 election night. We're seeing growth on streaming and shorts. Sequentially, MAUs grew from Q3 to Q4. 2025 was not a typical year – no election, lost Dan Bongino to the FBI – so sequential quarter growth was quite an achievement. Now into Q1, with shorts exploding, concurrent streamers moving, and Bongino back, we have tailwinds. The platform has never been more ready with shorts, Rumble Studio, and improved stability. I'm excited for this year with midterms coming. Credit to the engineering teams.
I love it. I don't want to get too much off that pathway. I have a couple follow-up questions, but one thing that just popped in my mind, this growth that you're seeing in Rumble Shorts obviously astounding. Is your pitch for why everyone should be using Rumble Shorts the same as Rumble itself – 'Hey, we care about your free speech' – or is there something else even better? Where do you think this growth is coming from?
It's a combination of everything. Obviously we're the free speech version of TikTok. But it's also very informational versus TikTok's DJ stuff. There's more learning. It's a discovery tool for your main channels, and eventually there will be monetization with ads, but we don't want to hinder growth. We've scaled back ads on rumble.com to one pre-roll. Shorts will introduce ads probably Q3 Q4 with a low ad load.
Absolutely. Love it. So, between Rumble shorts, ramping up sales, AI infrastructure, the return of one of the largest streamers, deeper ties to crypto and Tether with Rumble wallet. Asmongold too is coming.
Asmongold is coming. Another massive streamer. I anticipate we'll see more and more. That's why streaming hit a record in the last week – more people coming to the platform. Our community is amazing, high performance for advertisers. The whole streaming community has picked up Rumble in a way we haven't seen. We anticipate streamers like Asmongold will continue to come and the concurrent streamer peak will hit new highs.
Sitting on this side, it's interesting to see that snowball rolling bigger and bigger. Bongio is returning, now Asmongold. Correct me if I'm wrong, we owe a special thanks to Asmongold's aunt – she convinced him to check it out. So with that in mind, on live streaming, crypto, AI infrastructure – all these moving parts – is there a particular thing you think people are missing? A story they're not quite getting?
Yeah, we talk about that internally but we try not to be distracted. We want to deliver shareholder value. When I look at what we've built and the assets coming together, the market might not see exactly what we see. But I prefer to walk the walk. If the market doesn't believe, I'll show them they're wrong. Maybe it creates an opportunity. My job is to kick ass and put this company in a different place. We have all the tools, executed flawlessly, and with the Northern Data acquisition closing in Q2, we'll show a different revenue and EBITDA profile that will shock the markets.
Yeah, I mean, you don't have to comment on this, but I'm running some back of the napkin math and looking at Northern Data's numbers. Basic math tells me some serious jumps. I appreciate you expanding. And on that note, I know you love engaging with the audience, so do you want to do a couple questions directly from people tuning in right now?
Love it. Love it. Love it. So, folks, if you have a question, founder, CEO, and chairman of Rumble – you're getting a rare opportunity to speak directly with him. What's on your mind? Questions, comments, concerns? Let it fire. We'll do as many as we can. So, I see one here, RZM. With names like Asmongold announcing plans to multi-stream, how are you thinking about attracting creators who fit your core audience, like MeatEater, to also post and stream on Rumble beyond word of mouth?
That's a great question. The Tether advertisement commitment dovetails into this. We have a team proactively bringing in creators using Rumble Studio. When they use Rumble Studio, they multi-stream to all platforms including Rumble. We provide them sponsorship ads for Rumble wallet as part of the Tether ad commitment. So a creator like Asmongold can come in, use Rumble Studio, get a Rumble wallet read telling his audience to tip in Bitcoin, Tether, etc., and he gets paid for that. That brings new MAUs and chatters to Rumble. It's a win-win-win: Tether wins with advertising, creator wins with more money, Rumble wins with MAUs. We'll go after as many streamers and VOD creators as possible. This is different from 2023 when we had to do contracts. Now we have an ad budget in Rumble Studio waiting for them. It's there for everybody. We have a team getting the word out. The ad budget kicks in materially in Q2 and Q3.
I know this is anecdotal, but as a content creator, today I got a look behind the scenes of the new studio. It is comically easy to set up the multi-stream. Overlaying ads is a couple clicks. Hats off to the tech team. I'm very excited to get rocking with it. For creators, definitely worthwhile to check out.
Yeah, we got another one. Carlson8 question: any plans to advertise to users? Most people don't know Rumble exists.
Absolutely. This is where we're leaning in with Rumble Shorts. We have a lot of new non-political content coming in with Shorts, and we're using that to advertise to different cohorts across platforms. We just started today and will scale up in March. Rumble Shorts will be a growth driver and a mousetrap to grow outside our core audience. It's easier to get people to create Shorts channels than to start streaming.
audience that we have. Is the pitch along the lines of, 'Hey, if you're already making shorts on Tik Tok and YouTube and Instagram Reels, you might as well just load it up here as well because if you grow, you grow.'
And all the clippers out there, right? Like throw it up, throw up everything. Let's get everything up there and let's see what does well and we're seeing fantastic results here. So, it's an easy way to grow on Rumble right now. That scale to 1 million is just so fast. And what
1 week prior to the day we hit, we broke the million.
A little higher than that. It was like 1.2. When we broke 1 million, we broke it big.
It was close to about 1.2, almost close to a double. What's going to be really crazy is when we're talking about this in the future, 1 million is going to sound comically small at that pace.
I sure hope so. We're going for everything here. So, I like it.
What else do we have here? Do you anticipate issues with regulatory agencies in either Germany and the EU regarding Northern Data acquisition or having a presence in the EU with censorship laws?
I don't see any issues with the Northern Data stuff. Now, on the censorship stuff with Rumble, I definitely do see issues with that. There are a lot of countries around the world that are just not for free speech. They want to control everything you say and everything you can hear and see. That's just the nature of governments that want to stay in power. They're always going to do that to try to keep control. I think Europe's in a place that's gone quite downhill on this and I don't foresee that changing anytime soon. When it comes to censorship in Europe on the video side, yes, obviously that's concerning and we'll navigate appropriately where we can. With respect to Northern Data, that's a totally different business. That's the cloud. I don't see any kind of issues there at all.
Good to know. Here's an interesting one. For creators on Rumble, any comments on discoverability? It sounds like shorts is probably one of the most interesting tools for higher discoverability. Would you agree with that?
I would agree with that. Mrs. Mam just posted something along those lines. I'm getting better numbers on Rumble shorts than any other short platform I post to. Really excited for the future of shorts. We're seeing that with a lot of different creators. The pool's a little smaller right now, so you're seeing a lot of traction with creators who are using Rumble and already have a following. They're able to propel their shorts much better than on other platforms, which is amazing to see because that's what it's there for. It's the time to strike. If you look at the biggest creators on any platform right now, one of the most common correlations is being an early adopter. Right now, folks, this is it. It is really hard to beat the blue ocean strategy and that's where we're at right now.
It's a first market mover opportunity for anybody that wants to get into Rumble shorts. If you're in there early, if this thing turns out to be a huge success, you're probably going to have a high likelihood of being part of that success.
We'll do everything to continue growing that and pushing the pedal on that. Obviously, there are some people that aren't getting as many views as they think they're going to get, and maybe that's a function of the content sometimes. A lot of people might not realize their content is not as great. But also it's a function of our algorithm not being perfect either. So give it some time before giving up on it. I do think that as the algorithm improves, it'll really start picking the winners a lot better. Ultimately, it'll be the viewers that will decide which content is going to really take off as our algorithm gets better.
I like it. You were speaking a little bit on the earnings call about international audiences and this is kind of similar to that. Any ideas for auto audio translation to other languages?
We have something we're really getting into this whole AI space, not just because of Northern Data, but also with the Tether guys and how we're going to apply that to content on Rumble in terms of making it more informational, giving people moments in videos, translating, and condensing all that. All that is coming together in terms of planning. That's all in planning stages. Development on some of it has started and on others has not, but that is all part of the planning right now. Now that we have all our core products built—Rumble Shorts, Rumble Wallet—it was really hard to refine other things the way we wanted to. But now that all these products are out and we don't have a big major initiative like a wallet or shorts at this moment, it's all about taking everything we have and making it super awesome. That's what we're going to continue to do. The product teams are humming right now and I'm really excited about that.
Definitely seems so. That's awesome. Quick one. Can you explain what Rumble Shorts are? I'll let you do that.
Basically, short-form vertical content, similar to YouTube Shorts, TikTok, Instagram Reels. Generally, they're sub-60 seconds. It's just quick little dopamine hit forms of content. I can say from sitting on this side of the table, it's been requested out of this team for a while now, and we're finally getting it delivered. The numbers themselves are pretty astounding. So check it out. It's already on Rumble. You can see it for yourself. It's there, just a different style of content. They're short form, hence the name Shorts.
Glyph Glitch, the algorithm is dynamically improving. Is there an AI being utilized there?
Not yet. Right now, we're still manually improving it. The goal is to get it to a dynamically improving algorithm, and potentially we'll explore AI as well on that. Obviously, with the resources we're going to have, that could be pretty easy for us in the future. But it's not there yet. We're in the infancy of the algorithm. There's a lot of work to do on that algorithm. It'll continue to get better every week.
Any plans for Rumble to get into sports? You guys are already in sports.
In sports. If there's an opportunity to do more in sports, we're obviously interested in that. We started doing boxing matches on Rumble Premium. We got Street League Skateboarding, which is also on Rumble Premium. Sports is a very competitive space, a very expensive space. We've spent a lot of money doing sports. A lot of our cash has gone towards that. As an investment, it's not typically the best investment we've seen. But it's definitely something that performs a little better when you get into the smaller sports like Street League Skateboarding. If you look at YouTube spending $14 billion on the NFL rights, I don't know how directly impactful that is to their business, but clearly it's a game to capture as much live sports as possible right now for the Netflixes, Amazons, and YouTubes. It requires very deep pockets to compete in, and we're looking at it at a smaller scale.
Interesting. It's always kind of cool to see what's going on behind the curtain because we see it as consumers of what's happening day in and day out. So to get a little bit more insight, very interesting. What else do we got here? More sports in the lineup. I feel like a bunch of questions went right by and we missed them. Thoughts on the content such as Angel Studios movies or shows from Sunshine 13.
So yeah, in fact, we recently reached out to the Angel Studios guys. That's something that I think would be awesome to have on the platform. Maybe in the future there's something there, but we're very interested in working with Angel Studios if the opportunity arises. That would be pretty cool getting their portfolio on Rumble or Rumble Premium. Something that would definitely be interesting to me.
People like Rumble shorts. Could Rumble Wallet be expanded to general use? I'd like to buy crypto if I could through Rumble. From Embers.
So, the answer is it already is. You can buy Bitcoin from Rumble wallet right now, and you can use it as a wallet to purchase Bitcoin. You can use it as a wallet to purchase Tether Gold. If you want to invest in gold, that's one of the ways I'm now buying gold—I'm buying Tether Gold. You know what we should do? We should do an IRL live stream going to the vault in Switzerland and redeeming our Tether Gold for a gold bar. We'll go there tonight.
That would be a great stream.
