Interview with Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski - Rumble & Bitcoin? Shocking Stats From Florida & MORE!

It goes. It's uh I think we won the battle as far as I'm concerned right now. I think we got to take that battle to different pastures like Canada and see what we can do over there. But the US is looking pretty good. Not to get ahead of ourselves, and I'm watching Bonino as regularly as everybody else. Yeah, there has been a significant victory on the American front, and you know, gonna keep a little bit of pressure on the Trump administration not to hire too many swamp creatures back into an admin. But no, taking it to Canada is the goal now.

Yeah, so he's one of the largest gamers, I think on the internet, top five at least, some days top one, number one. And we have been really pushing the gaming sector a lot recently. And what I wanted to do is really kind of give it an injection the same way we kind of gave Rumble an injection when we brought on Dan Bonino. We wanted someone to really take that pole and really lead the gaming side, and that's what we did with Dr. Disrespect. He's now going to start on December 2nd on Rumble. He'll be exclusively providing content to Rumble Premium, so he'll be multi-streaming both on YouTube and Rumble, and then exclusively providing that content to Premium. So he's going to be bringing his whole Champions Club to Rumble and all his viewers to Rumble, which, just like Dan when he came to Rumble early on in late 2020, it was the rising tide that raised all boats. And that's kind of the effect that we're looking for here in the gaming community. We got politics on lock. The next two categories are going to be crypto and gaming. Those are what I'm really focused on when it comes to growing Rumble. So that's what we're going to be stepping the gas pedal on right now.

I think the issues that people see when it comes to Rumble is that we don't have that viewership that other platforms have in that category. And that's exactly what he's going to help do. He's going to help drive that viewership, help raise the tide to raise all the boats. So that's probably the largest complaint. Obviously we have product features that we need to really integrate. One of them is going to be gifted subs, that's going to be very important for the gaming community, and we're hoping to roll that out here before the end of the year. And then in terms of everything else, I think we're pretty up to speed now that we have this super low latency for all our premium members and super high quality streaming. I think we're really ready for it, and I think this is the future for 2025 on Rumble: really attacking these two categories and really ultimately building something that is unique, something a little different than YouTube and very different than Netflix, and bringing in kind of a hybrid model of a let's call it a YouTube Premium Netflix. One thing that YouTube Premium doesn't provide is having exclusive content with creators. We want to take it a step further and provide that through Rumble Premium. So anybody that's a Rumble Premium subscriber is not only going to get the premium experience which is access to early features, the green check mark, a no advertising experience, but they're also going to be able to get high quality content, exclusive content, maybe documentaries, maybe movies in the future, whatever we can attract on the platform. It'll be open to whoever wants to bring content into Premium. And I believe we can have something very special both on this hybrid experience of YouTube and Netflix, and that's where we're putting the gas, pouring the gas right now, and that's where we're stepping on the pedal. And Dr. Disrespect is the latest addition of that.

Yeah, pass that on because we're really pushing the pedal on recommendations in AI to try to help discovery a lot. So that's something that's very important to us right now. In terms of new products that we're going to be offering in the new year, and I've said this a few times now, we want to introduce a creator program that is going to be unlike any other creator program out there. So early next year we're going to be launching our own creator program which I think can revolutionize the way in which we're going to pay out creators. It's going to be very rewarding to creators that work very hard, put in the hours, and provide exclusive content to Rumble Premium. And that's something that we're really keen on launching with our new dashboard for creators. So you hit certain metrics and you do certain things within Rumble, you'll then qualify. And it won't be a subjective qualification, this will be a very objective qualification based on milestones. You hit those milestones and then you'll immediately be enrolled into this creator program which will then provide you far greater revenue opportunities than you typically see on any other platform. So that's what we're driving towards as the new thing for Rumble in early 2025. And gaming and crypto are the two categories that we're looking to propel that.

No update that I can provide publicly yet. Where it did leave off is that obviously we've updated our lawsuit to include more defendants in the GARM lawsuit, and we obviously saw GARM disband itself a couple days after we filed. So no updates yet, but it's something that I think is going to change very rapidly. And what we did say in our earnings call recently is that we did get one advertiser that did cancel us come back. I'm not able to say the name yet, but they'll be deploying ad budget in December. So things are changing. I'd like it to be faster, but sometimes slow and steady wins the race. We did get one advertiser back in the fold, which is great news, and it's a big, very well-known advertiser that everyone knows. And it happens very slowly, then all at once when they realize this is where the eyeballs are for long format content. I don't care what they say, people want to advertise where the eyeballs are, set aside the political discrimination that they've been engaging in.

Oh no, we absolutely are. This is a very important category to us. That's one I already kind of considered part of the free speech category in a way. Like in terms of drift categories like gaming and crypto, I think they're very much different than what we currently have. But in terms of the Second Amendment, gun tube, we're all in on that. We're looking at as much as we can do on that front, talking to as many people as possible to see how we can do that and make it work.

Yes. So we're at this point what we're trying to do is give them greater options on Rumble. You can do a lot of these things on Rumble. If you continue to want to use locals, you're more than welcome to. We find that the bigger complaint right now is that people don't like promoting Rumble and then locals, it takes away a lot of the oomph. So we're trying to get all those features into Rumble as quickly as possible. So we'll see where that goes. As of this moment right now, we're all about keeping those two brands integrated as much as possible but also separated in the sense that there's zero plan right now to remove that platform. It's here to stay for the moment.

I do think Netflix is taking pages out of our book. We were the first ones to do that when bringing in slap fighting on Rumble Live. And I think that Netflix is going to become more like Rumble in a lot of ways, and Rumble with Rumble Premium is kind of becoming a little bit more like them. And I think there's going to be a convergence of all these markets. It's going to take a couple years, but it's going to happen. And you're going to see basically a lot of different platforms with a lot of different exclusive content, and it's almost going to be like cable TV with different cable networks. You're going to have different platforms with their own types of content. And I think a lot of these companies are here to stay, whether it's YouTube or Netflix or Rumble. All these companies eventually will converge and they'll all have their own lanes with their own content, and everyone's going to pick what they like and what they don't like and kind of go into maybe flip-flop between those different platforms or maybe be dedicated to only one. But I do see the 1970s and 80s cable networks kind of being the new platforms of today. So I think that's kind of where the market's going to go in the next decade. Remains to be seen, but that's what we're betting on and that's how we're designing things here at Rumble to go forward.

Well, we just approved with our board that we're going to have a Bitcoin treasury strategy. We're all in on Bitcoin as a company. We love this community. Just like we're moving into the gaming community, we're going into the crypto community. And one of the things that I think is very important is to not be disingenuous when you enter these communities. You got to really mean it, really want to be in it. And I think having a Bitcoin treasury shows how much we mean it and how bullish we are on this community for Rumble. When you look at Bitcoin and you look at Rumble, you almost kind of feel the same kind of ethos: freedom of speech, Bitcoin decentralization, all kind of goes hand in hand. These are two things that operate very close to each other. If there's any company that's going to step into this first and do it first, it has to be Rumble. Rumble is the same in my opinion. So stepping in, obviously we're not the first ones to do it, but in terms of a brand platform, we are the first brand platform to do it that I can think of publicly. But it's something that I think is very important. It shows how genuine we are about this community. It also shows that we're pretty confident about the forward years of our business and where it's going to go. So I'm excited. I think this is a pretty cool move that I think many other companies in the future will follow. I do think this will be a corporate strategy amongst the biggest companies in the world one day. And I think Rumble being one of the first movers is important. That's what we wanted to do: show our commitment to the community, show that we believe in it, and we want to be there first.

Yeah, it's just taking some of our excess cash that we have that we won't need and moving some of that into holding Bitcoin instead of holding cash.

This is exclusively for Bitcoin.

We are, this is a big step that we want to take. We're definitely looking for a partner right now and we're talking to a few in order to integrate. And one of the things we're looking for is a partner that's going to be using our cloud. So if we're going to support their platform, we want them to support ours. That's something we're very much looking at right now and something that I do want to integrate as soon as possible. So yes, we love the ability for people to tip and to be able to subscribe in crypto. We like the ability to pay creators in crypto. How we're going to manage that and how we're going to do it remains to be seen, but it's something that I'm very keen on getting done and finding the right partner to do it.

Yeah, so Rumble Cloud is a competitor to AWS, a competitor to Oracle, a competitor to Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud and many others. But generally speaking, as we all saw what happened to Parler many years ago, companies like Amazon that don't carry the same ethos and the same values as Bitcoin or as Rumble will press a button and shut you down if they want to. So we came up with Rumble Cloud. We've been building it for the last four years and we launched it this year publicly for public use earlier this year, I think in second quarter or late first quarter. And the idea is basically giving everybody the option to pick a cloud that has the same values that they might have in terms of freedom of expression and how we do business, rather than the big tech companies. In addition to that, I also believe the current market in the cloud business is like an oligopoly. It is an oligopoly controlled by a couple big companies that control the majority of the market and they price gouge quite a bit. So not only do you have the ethos that you have with Rumble on Rumble Cloud, but you also have the ability to really cut costs as well. I think there's an opportunity there to save people a lot of money by moving over to Rumble Cloud. So both on the ethos and on the price competitiveness, that's where we're attacking when it comes to Rumble Cloud.

Yeah, so we're definitely that's something that we've been working on. That got delayed till earlier next year just because we reshifted our priorities. We're really focused on gifted subs, reposting, and the new creator dashboard and the new creator program. So we want to get those out the door before we get that out the door. So once we get those out the door, a lot more attention will be towards Rumble shorts.