By 2008 and 2009, there was no game in town that competed on video. It was impossible to compete against Google in YouTube. I went to VCs pitching an opportunity to help small creators get distribution, but nobody bit.
YouTube was the 800 pound gorilla. Why would you start something to compete?
Exactly, it was impossible in their eyes. So I started Rumble in 2013 to help small creators. I noticed that after Google integrated YouTube into search, they started picking winners. By 2013, if you were a big brand or part of a multi-channel network, you got preference.
So they would try to build stars, would you say?
That wasn't their intention. They were trying to figure out how to monetize safely. Big corporations felt safer to monetize than home creators.
A lot of material in the early days was just ripped and put on. There was a lot of illegal material.
YouTube was built on the backs of stolen content in my opinion. They grew because of an enormous amount of stolen content.
Now looking back, it's stolen content, but at the time it was a resource to see things you couldn't access elsewhere.
Yeah, large companies weren't forward-thinking enough to digitize their libraries.
So you'd put a Saturday Night Live clip, someone else would take it, build their audience, and monetize someone else's content.
Yeah, that was a lot of YouTube's early days.
For sure. They had a lot of lawsuits from Viacom and the music industry. When Google took on YouTube, they were aware of the challenges. They started looking for safer content to monetize, leaving behind the small creators who built YouTube.
Yeah, exactly. The Charlie bit my finger type of content, America's Funniest Home Videos.
That was the opportunity I identified. In 2013, the premise of Rumble was to focus on small creators who were being deprioritized on YouTube. They couldn't monetize anymore due to new rules. We saw this opportunity to help the creators being censored or deprioritized.
Would you say it was like the independent option to the corporate giant?
Correct. Homebased creators, small creators.
How do you come up with the name? That's actually one of the coolest stories.
In high school I started websites passing around funny pictures. A friend who owned many domains gave me rumble.com as a birthday gift when I turned 30. He said, 'Go build that video business to beat YouTube. It's going to be worth a billion dollars one day.' It was the best gift ever.
Tell me about the world of video websites. How many were there?
There were dozens: CollegeHumor, Vimeo, Break.com, eBaum's World. They were viral clips a minute or two long. People would film at home and send them to these sites. Then YouTube came along and Google bought it, crushing all these businesses overnight.
How difficult was that business to build infrastructure-wise? What did you need?
It was really expensive to host. You needed financing and developers. You couldn't monetize at first. It took YouTube a decade to figure out monetization. The barrier to entry was high. The other part was getting distribution. Google integrated YouTube into search, so all search traffic went to YouTube instead of other sites.
So before YouTube, if you searched for a video, you might end up on your site.
Yeah, search engines treated all sites fairly. Google search was the main route for distribution.
So if that group of creators is no longer finding voice at YouTube, there will be people who want to watch that stuff.
Correct. YouTube moved to highly produced stuff and big corporations. We focused on small creators and grassroots content. We built a good business doing that.
What was the nature of the content? What did it go from and to?
Cute cats and dogs, family babies. Then 2020 happened. I got a call from the ranking member of the House Intel Committee. He asked if he brought his content to Rumble, would people find it? I said yes. He brought his podcast and got 200,000 to 300,000 subscribers in a few months. That was mind-blowing.
It was never started as a political thing.
Yeah, I'm a Canadian. I started it to help small creators. The congressman's success showed us the demand. On YouTube he had only 11,000 subscribers after 4 years. On Rumble he got 200,000 virtually overnight. That was a wake-up call.
What would have been a big account before that on Rumble?
10,000 or 5,000. He had 200,000 to 300,000.
How many creators were there on Rumble? We had about a million users.
That was over seven years. He got 200,000 to 300,000 in 2-3 months, while on YouTube he had 10,000 in 4 years.
At that point, did you have any other competitors besides YouTube? Any other small up-and-coming video platforms?
There was Daily Motion, but they all got wiped out in 2007-2008. We were the only one still trying. I always wanted to compete because I felt YouTube was unfairly boosted by Google. I wanted to do better for the small guy.
I feel like so many companies get started because someone felt they weren't being treated right by the big guys.
Exactly. That drove the passion. As a Canadian, I have a temperature for American politics. When I saw what happened on Rumble, I asked my developer if it was real. It was real. The fact that an elected official only had 11,000 subs on YouTube and got 200,000 on Rumble was a real wake-up.
And from that moment, Rumble went from a million users to about 30 million within 6 months.
Yes, explosive growth in late 2020 and 2021. We didn't throttle anybody. We kept an open and fair platform with the same terms YouTube had a decade ago. We saw Russell Brand's account and it was real. The majority of content on Rumble is also on YouTube, but on Rumble people watch it because it's not pushed down.
The majority of things on Rumble are also on YouTube.
Yeah, for sure. But on YouTube they're pushed down. On Rumble they're treated fairly. Dan Bonino had 700,000 on YouTube but over 3 million on Rumble.
It kept happening. We took our first investment in April 2021. We had pitched the same investor in 2014 with no interest, but in 2021 they invested.
What could you afford to do differently with the investment?
We had to build our own infrastructure because hosting platforms were shutting down content based on politics. We needed to be independent.
So everything on the internet is hosted by someone.
What are the options for hosting? I used to rent space in a data center. Then cloud companies like Amazon AWS, Microsoft, Google Cloud came.
Back in the early 2000s, they didn't exist. Now you have these huge cloud companies.
Was that a big part of the expense, the hosting?
Cloud companies made it easier to start but more expensive. For a startup, bare metal is cheaper. We had the muscle memory to do it the old way.
Luckily you were doing it long enough to know how to do it the other way. Many people who came after cloud providers don't know where to start.
Yeah. When Parler got shut down by Amazon, they couldn't move to bare metal quickly. We took our investment and built our own infrastructure so Rumble would never face that fate.
Only things that have ever been shut down based on politics?
No, we shut down for illegal activity. But never based on politics. The excuses used for Parler were manufactured. Facebook and YouTube had far more of that activity. It was a double standard.
To be clear, you didn't have any political agenda. Just being open.
Just being fair. Allowing people to speak freely about politics and COVID. We didn't allow illegal activity.
So the only thing dictating what made it onto Rumble was legality.
I wouldn't say free speech absolutist. We don't allow calls for violence, spam, pornography, doxing. We're a bit away from absolutism.
How did you decide not to have adult stuff even if it's legal?
It wasn't a thoughtful decision. When we started in 2013, we set terms and never moved the goalposts. YouTube, Twitter, Facebook changed their terms every year. We stuck to our original terms. We haven't moved for media or government pressure. It's in our DNA to be consistent and fair.
What do you think it was about you or your upbringing that allowed you to have that strength?
It's a good question. It was my parents. They are very good people, honorable. My dad always stuck to what's right and never fell to peer pressure. That has gone down our entire company.
My parents and grandparents are just very good people. Never do something wrong. When you know you're doing something right, stick to it. Don't let anybody influence you. Honor is the perfect word for my dad.
My dad, honor is the perfect word. Stick to what's right. Never allow someone to push you into something you don't think is right. That's gone down our company. We've had a lot of media come after us with twisted stories, but we've gone through quite a bit.
We've had governments turn us off. France and Brazil.
I can't remember if it was France or Brazil first. The first to ban Rumble was China. France sent a letter saying they'd turn us off at the telco level unless we removed content that didn't violate our terms. It was during the Ukraine-Russia war. They wanted us to remove pro-Russian channels. We said no. They said we'd be violating sanctions. So we turned off Rumble in France and challenged them in court. The media said we were pro-Russian. A year later, the Russians wanted us to remove anti-Russian content. We took the same principles. We're not going to censor based on political beliefs.
Yeah, you're not playing any sides.
It's not a side. These are our terms of service. You can't live in a proper democratic society if you can't express your opinions.
So you're not a political actor at all.
At all. You're out of it.
Then the Russians turned Rumble off at the IP level. So Rumble is not accessible in Russia, but YouTube was at the time. So maybe YouTube was complying with the Russians. We weren't.
So France turns us off because of Russia. Russia turns us off because of their reasons. Only a month ago, we prevailed in court in France and we're back on without changing anything.
Without changing anything. We beat them in court. The judge said the minister didn't have the authority. It was a moral win.
Yeah, it's the principle. You were fighting based on a principle and the principle won.
I didn't think we would win. It was really cool. It gives you a feeling of hope. Those wins mean a lot to me. It was an ideological principled approach, not based on business. In the long term, the principle will have a real benefit.
Tell me the Brazil story.
The Brazil story was not even politics. A creator called Monarch, the Joe Rogan of Brazil, was ordered to be removed by a Supreme Court justice. We didn't know why. He didn't do anything illegal. We got orders to remove political people too. We didn't comply. We challenged them in court and turned off Brazil. In February, we got a notice to release the creator. We turned Brazil back on. Four days later, the justice sent a letter to censor another creator. We said no again. This time we didn't shut down Brazil; they shut us off at the ISP level. We litigated in US court and got the result we wanted. The justice named me specifically, saying I'm trying to destabilize Brazil. Recently, the US imposed sanctions on that justice for censorship of Rumble and X. X complied after a month, but we didn't. We're still shut off in Brazil.
And do you think that's something that eventually will work itself out?
I think so. The problem is different. In the US, you take it to court and it goes up to the Supreme Court. The Brazilian Supreme Court justice created his own order at the top without due process. That's unheard of.
So now you're on everywhere in the world except China, Russia, and Brazil.
It's a big world. That's great.
Yeah, the France win was a big moral victory. It's still early to see growth in Europe.
Do you do any kind of advertising or promotion outside of Rumble itself?
Yeah, absolutely. We're going to go very international in 2026. We've been isolated to the US, but that's a huge focus.
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From 2020 to now, how much has Rumble grown?
We reported 47 million monthly active users in the last quarter. That's up 47 times since 2020.
And would you say that the content is across the board now?
More so, it's getting there. We're making a big effort to diversify. Since the 2024 elections, political content is still popular, but we're trying to be more than just politics. We brought on Street League skateboarding exclusively. Comedy would be a great category.
Seems like comedy would be a really good area.
Yeah, I agree. We're talking about how to do that. Many comedians have huge audiences on YouTube, so we need to entice them. There's a monetization barrier.
How does monetization work on Rumble versus YouTube?
YouTube's monetization is pre-roll ads. Rumble does the same. Also tipping and subscriptions. We have a competitive advantage with the Rumble wallet, which allows tipping in Bitcoin or stablecoin. It's in beta on iOS and Android.
We took a $775 million investment from Tether in February 2025. They are the world's largest stablecoin. We hold Bitcoin at Rumble. With the new administration being pro-crypto, we felt it was an opportunity to be a first mover. We're looking forward to launching it big in 2026.
How is the experience of Rumble different on the website versus the app?
All the same features primarily.
Do you on Apple TV as well?
