Rumble Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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August 14, 2023

There are 6 speakers on the call.

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, greetings, and welcome to the Rumble Second Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. A brief question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. Please note this event is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Shannon Nabin, Investor Relations for Rumble.

Operator

Please go ahead.

Speaker 1

Thank you, operator. I'm here today with Chris Pavlovsky, Founder, Chairman and CEO of Rumble Brandon Alexanderoff, The CFO and Tyler Hughes, the COO. A press release detailing our Q2 2023 results was released today and is available on the Investor Relations section of our company website. Before we begin the formal presentation, I would like to remind everyone that statements made on the call and webcast may include predictions, estimates or other information that might be considered forward looking. All forward looking statements are made only as of the date of this webcast and should be considered in conjunction with the cautionary statements in our earnings release and the risk factors included in our filings with the SEC.

Speaker 1

Future company updates will be available via press releases and via the company's identified social media channel. I will now turn the call over to Rumble's Founder, Chairman and CEO, Chris Palvosky.

Speaker 2

Hello and thank you for joining us today. The Q2 of 20 3 marks one of the most revealing quarters in the history of Rumble. Our business model is working and starting to provide exceptional results ahead of our I can say confidently Rumble's content portfolio is now diversified. The diversified content in a time with a slow news cycle in conjunction with major video and streaming product improvements Has helped drive Rumble's consumption to an all time high of an estimated 11,800,000,000 minutes 11,800,000,000 average minutes watched to 25 demographic due to our expansive content offerings and declines in the older demos partly due to a slow news cycle and news fatigue. We anticipate the older demos to start growing in the later half of twenty twenty three and twenty twenty four as the presidential election cycle starts to ramp up.

Speaker 2

The new sports leagues and top cultural influencers are now starting to show gains with brand advertisers. One of the more important product developments in the Q2 was the alpha release of Rack's creator sponsorship marketplace. Typically, On other platforms, a creator monetizes through 2 sources, programmatic advertising and subscriptions. Most often in the cases of YouTube and Patreon, for example, these two sources are fragmented. Rumble's Offering that is unique to our platform, our better mousetrap is the introduction of the creator sponsorship marketplace, which creates Three sources of monetization for our creator: programmatic advertising, subscriptions and now sponsorships.

Speaker 2

No platform provides all of these sources seamlessly. This is how Rumble will differentiate and be the best place for creators to monetize. Here's the best part. We've already proven this model in a manual fashion. In order to substantially grow revenue, we must now Take what our teams are doing manually and automate and scale it through Rack.

Speaker 2

Let me put this in perspective, because I think it is very important. Rumble recorded $25,000,000 in revenue in the 2nd quarter, a record. But as I stated earlier, it's the most revealing quarter yet. A significant amount of Rumble's sponsorship revenue is currently being manually managed across a small segment of creators. To put it in perspective, fewer than 50 creators.

Speaker 2

And importantly, it doesn't include some of our biggest creators like Dan Bongino. It also doesn't include any meaningful revenue from our biggest signings in digital sports and cultural influencers like Kaizena and I show speed. We anticipate that we will see the benefit of these signings in 2024 as the sales process ramps up. My team's goal is to take what we are doing with a small segment of creators and automate it via rack across thousands of creators who can be onboarded rapidly. Think about this.

Speaker 2

From fewer than 50 to 1,000, you can start to see how easily this can scale and what kind of impact this can have on revenue. We believe we are beginning to see a clear line of sight in this business and its growth trajectory given the significant opportunities in front of Rumble is only monetizing a small segment of creators and we have proven that we have an immensely valuable audience, which is largely untapped And it's especially untapped with our largest signings in 2023. We believe it's important to measure Rumble's on a year over year basis. As we have articulated in the past, until Rack is fully launched and fully up to scale, We expect our quarters will continue to experience variability during the scaling and automation process. When looking at the business on a year over year basis, I want to highlight how we stack against the largest tech companies in the world.

Speaker 2

Starting in 2021, Rumble's Early revenue growth on a year over year basis is on a similar trajectory to Facebook's in 2,005 and 2,006. What's not similar is how much capital our competitors required versus what Rumble requires. Rumble is trailblazing a new way in tech, One that includes a steadfast philosophy on spending, a shared belief in good old fashioned hard work, building amazing teams and most importantly Unlocking long term value for shareholders without sacrificing growth. We do not need to raise tens of 1,000,000,000 to take on Big Tech. We've already done that with less than $500,000,000 Think about this.

Speaker 2

We are generating similar revenue growth to big tech companies In their early years with only a fraction of what we believe will be the required capital. All of this has come before the introduction of one of our most anticipated products. For the full year of 2022, Amazon generated $80,000,000,000 in cloud revenue. Azure delivered 34 and Google 26. What Rumble has done in the video space with Taking market share away from Big Tech is what we plan to do in the cloud business.

Speaker 2

Let me provide a little peek behind the curtain. Rumble's beta cloud offering is on pace to launch ahead of expectations. Our teams have been hard at work and they expect To over deliver on the product offerings, Rumble Cloud will now include virtual machines, Kubernetes, block and object storage, Among many other services, I believe our cloud will serve a significant share of the cloud market that is disenfranchised with Big Tech Censorship as well as a significant share that is disenfranchised with Big Tex pricing. We are already in discussions with a potential customer in the Fortune 500 and plan to provide more updates in the near future. To sum up, Rumble had an incredible quarter.

Speaker 2

Our revenues are tracking similar to what Big Tech accomplished almost 2 decades ago and we are doing it with a fraction of the capital. Our moves with diversifying content are starting to show gains with brand advertisers. Rack is on pace to offer 1 of the most And our cloud offering is finally around the corner. We stand before a tremendous opportunity. I previously said that I believe 2024 will be our Super Bowl And now I am more confident than ever in that statement.

Speaker 2

Thank you for joining us on this incredible journey. With that, I'll turn the call over to our CFO, Brandon Alexandroff. Thanks, Chris.

Speaker 3

I'll now take you through our Q2 financials at a very high level before turning the call over to the operator for Q and A. As Chris mentioned, we reported revenues of $25,000,000 for the quarter, our best quarter yet. This compares to $4,400,000 for Q2 2022. The growth was primarily driven by an $18,000,000 increase in advertising revenue and a $2,600,000 increase in licensing and other revenue. The increase in advertising revenue was driven by an increase in consumption and as Chris mentioned, the introduction of new advertising solutions for creators, Publishers and advertisers including Host Red Advertising and Rack, both of which we started to build and test in the second half of 2022.

Speaker 3

The increase in licensing and other revenue was largely driven by subscription as well as licensing creator contracts, Tipping, cloud platform and hosting fees. Our cost of services includes all programming and content costs Related to payments to content providers, including amounts paid to creators based on revenues generated as well as additional costs related to incentivizing top creators to promote and join our platform. Cost of services also includes 3rd party service provider costs, Such as data center and networking, staffing costs directly related to professional service fees and costs paid to publishers. Cost of services for the quarter were $40,800,000 compared to $4,200,000 in Q2 a year ago. The increase was due to an increase in programming and Content cost of $35,000,000 posting expenses of $700,000 and other service costs of $1,000,000 Moving to our cash position.

Speaker 3

We ended the quarter with $296,700,000 in cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities compared to 338,300,000 As of December 31, 2022. To date, as intended, a large portion of our cash used Has been to acquire content by providing economic incentives, including minimum guaranteed earnings to a limited number of content creators, including sports leagues, Which as Chris mentioned, we have not yet begun to monetize meaningfully. This content acquisition strategy has allowed us to enter key content verticals and secure top content creators in those verticals before we have full monetization capabilities in place. Additionally, our financials and note disclosure in the 10 Q reflect the previously announced all stock transaction for the acquisition of David Sacks' Collin during the Q2. Lastly, and in light of Rumble becoming publicly traded, the company's audit committee of the Board undertook a process to consider a potential audit firm change.

Speaker 3

This process included the committee inviting several registered public accounting firms, including Moss Adams LLP to participate. Following completion of the process, on August 10, the Audit Committee appointed Moss Adams, a large U. S.-based audit firm as the company's new auditor. This change is also detailed in our earnings release and associated Form 8 ks that we filed earlier today. That concludes my prepared remarks.

Speaker 3

Before I turn the call over to the operator, I invite you all to join Chris this evening at 7 pm Eastern Time in an exclusive post earnings interview with Matt Kors to be streamed live on the Matt Kors Rumble channel. I will now turn the call over to the operator To open up the line for questions from our covering analysts.

Operator

Thank you. We will now be conducting a question and answer Our first question is from Thomas Forte of B. A. Davidson. Please go ahead.

Speaker 4

Great. Three questions for me and congrats on the quarter. So I know you gave a lot of details there. But on the cost of services side and I apologize for opening with the cost Can you talk about which costs are fixed and which ones are variable?

Speaker 3

Yes. So there's certain costs that are variable that are contingent upon revenue and that's the amount that we share With creators, we don't disclose the amount for each, but there's an element of that that's variable. Then there's an element that's more fixed, which are the incentives that we pay to the creators as well. And that's more fixed.

Speaker 4

Great. And then you talked I think on the last call about your effort to upgrade your user interfaces. Can you talk about where those initiatives stand today?

Speaker 2

Hey, Tom. It's Chris from Rumble. So, yes, our user interfaces, we made an Expensive list of upgrades over the last quarter, which we'll be sharing on Twitter and on Truth today later tonight. But the major overhaul that we're going to be doing the video page is expected to launch in the next 2 weeks.

Speaker 4

Great. And then 3rd and final, I feel like when you listen to pretty much any company's earnings call, They go on at length about artificial intelligence and what it means. So can you talk about what AI means for Rumble?

Speaker 2

This is Chris. Yes. So we've been looking at artificial intelligence quite a bit in the last quarter, me personally and obviously our tech side. Obviously, for on the cloud side of the business, we are very anxious To start selling to that community on the cloud side. So once we get the cloud up and running, we think we can be a very important part to the AI community On the cloud, I see that as a massive opportunity of growth for cloud as we roll that out later in the year.

Speaker 2

And in terms of Rumble and integrations of AI, we're looking at tools with respect to uploading and how it can make the experience for the creator easier and bring more tools to the uploading process as

Speaker 4

So as a quick follow-up there and that was very helpful. Does it help you at all or would it or could it help you at all With moderating content? And then do you have any just broader philosophical views on AI as far as It's to what extent Tadal is going to be transformative? Or just how it may or may not Help you advance your efforts to be the neutral YouTube or be the neutral AWS?

Speaker 2

Yes. So what we're seeing in terms of AI like the complaints and biases It's something that I wouldn't want to touch moderation with at all at this point just because of its infancy. So, yes, I wouldn't we haven't we're not really willing to explore at this point in time any AI with respect to moderation. And When it comes to our T's and C's, we proposed a terms and conditions last year that we are still excited to roll out this year In terms of how we're going to process the moderation and involve the community in that. And I think that's a better step for us On the moderation front and then using AI for that.

Speaker 2

And then can you repeat the second part of your question there?

Speaker 4

Sure. Just philosophically, if you think that AI is going to be transformative as it relates to your efforts to essentially run the neutral YouTube or the neutral AWS?

Speaker 2

Yes. So the way I look at it on the cloud, I see it as There's a huge requirement for processing power for AI. And we feel like So like we feel like as a company we can service that market and help expand that market through our cloud.

Speaker 4

Great. Thanks for taking my questions.

Operator

The next question we have is from Jason Halstein of Oppenheimer. Please go ahead.

Speaker 5

Hey, several questions. We can go kind of one at a time. So you called out the success of Any other metrics you want to share on other content deals you announced in the Q1 that you've now seen? So that's question 1. Just anything on kind of content metrics you want to call out besides Giant Speed?

Speaker 2

Yes. So we're in the very early stages of the digital sports, the launches that we've had there. We also launched No. Academics, Jitian, RiceGum, we're seeing like an incredible performance with RiceGum. He's been one of our top on the platform.

Speaker 2

We're really excited about that. And when it comes to these creators like Obviously, Client Speed iShow Speed had a medical situation in Japan where he's been out for the last But they're excited to ramp up very shortly here. And then But one more thing I wanted to add is The way we've really kind of shifted the audience in the last quarter to the 2018 to 2024 demo because of all these because of the digital sports and the cultural So we had a really significant audience in the 2018 to 2024 demo. And What I love about that is that as we go into the end of this year and into next year, we think we can compound those audiences have both that 18 to audience and then the bring back with the new cycle on the older audiences, I see that as a real big opportunity for us.

Speaker 5

And then it was good to see obviously the engagement per user was up Pretty nicely quarter to quarter. However, obviously, there was a cost associated with that showing up in the cost of revenues. Is it should we assume that like this quarter should mark the bottom as far as like the negative gross margin? So From here, there should be kind of just improved kind of leverage on that gross margin. So I don't know who wants to take that question.

Speaker 2

Yeah. I'll answer that. We're not going to provide any guidance at this point. But what I will say is that I feel that in the first and second quarter on bringing in new content and adding signing and signing creators to the platform. We're going to continue to do that, but And be very opportunistic with that.

Speaker 2

But I don't see the need to be as aggressive as we were in the last two quarters. So I don't think you're going to see us at the same pace that you saw in the last two quarters. But we will be Very opportunistic when something that we feel that has a really good business use business case for us, we will jump on top of that. But we've met our goals On the signings in terms of diversifying and bringing in a younger audience. And now we're really focused on really monetizing that audience And growing the engagement over the next year.

Speaker 5

And then on the selling expense, maybe how do you think about that needing to Scale increased as you increase revenue to RAC. So kind of how automated will the selling be given any kind of major point that You're basically doing like $2,000,000 per creator on an annual basis, right, with these 50 creators manually. And So how should we think about sales expense relative to rack as you scale up in Automate?

Speaker 2

Yes. The way the beauty of Rack is that it will carry multiple ways to monetize The programmatic advertising route is going to be one way. The other route is going to be the sponsorship. Sponsorship requires currently a lot more it requires a very manual relationship with the creator. And what we want to do is we want to take that into complete automation or as much automation as possible with as little overhead as possible in terms of managing that.

Speaker 2

So I do see massive opportunity with that and scaling that. And we have Alpha released that now and We are furthering and bettering that product as fast as we can. But I do see the cost The rack, obviously, significantly less than doing it manually on a per creator basis.

Speaker 5

And then just last question. I mean, obviously, we're pretty far into the 3rd quarter at this point. So from a user standpoint, I don't know if there's any I know you're not going to give us kind of a quarter to date Where we are with MAU, but just any kind of sense of kind of we obviously worked off On a sequential basis kind of political, you have new content creep on the platform. Like do we think Kind of where to bottom here now on kind of MAUs and it should grow sequentially?

Operator

I'm not

Speaker 2

going to provide any guidance, but I will say that we've been saying that as we get into the presidential election cycle here And obviously the debate the first primary debate which will be exclusively streamed on Rumble for the online streaming Is on August 23. We do anticipate that 2024 and as we get to this presidential election cycle things will definitely start And with the obviously the deals we have in place on the digital sports leagues And the cultural influencers, we don't see that audience disappearing. So we look to grow on that and build on the engagement there as well.

Speaker 5

Thank you.

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes today's Q and A session. Thank you for joining us. You may now disconnect your lines.

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