Rumble Q2 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

Key Takeaways

  • Neutral Sentiment: Rumble disclosed a preliminary proposal to acquire AI and HPC provider Northern Data via an exchange offer of Class A shares, marking a key step in its M&A strategy but still subject to due diligence and final terms.
  • Positive Sentiment: Rumble reported 51 million MAUs in Q2—its eighth consecutive quarter above 50 million and the first full quarter without top streamer Dan Bongino—underscoring platform stickiness and a diverse creator base.
  • Positive Sentiment: Q2 revenue was $25.1 million, up 12% year-over-year, ARPU rose 24% sequentially to $0.42, and improved audience monetization alongside content cost reductions helped shrink its adjusted EBITDA loss.
  • Positive Sentiment: Strategic partnerships with Cumulus Media, a leading AI advertising partner, and Tether are driving new ad and product initiatives, including the upcoming Rumble Wallet launch for crypto tipping powered by MoonPay.
  • Negative Sentiment: Despite progress, Rumble’s adjusted EBITDA loss remained $20.5 million in Q2 and it used $17.5 million in cash, highlighting ongoing unprofitability even with a $306.4 million liquidity position.
AI Generated. May Contain Errors.
Earnings Conference Call
Rumble Q2 2025
00:00 / 00:00

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Operator

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Rumble Incorporated Second Quarter twenty twenty five Earnings Call. All participants are in a listen only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Shannon Devine, Investor Relations for Rumble. Please go ahead.

Shannon Devine
Shannon Devine
Investor Relations at Rumble

Thank you, operator. I'm here today with Chris Pawlowski, Founder, Chairman and CEO of Rumble and Brandon Alexandrov, CFO. A press release detailing our second quarter twenty twenty five results was released yesterday and available on the Investor Relations section of our website. Before we begin the formal presentation, I would like to remind everyone that statements made on this call 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 call and should be considered in conjunction with the company's cautionary statements in our earnings release and the factors included in our filings with the SEC.

Shannon Devine
Shannon Devine
Investor Relations at Rumble

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

Chris Pavlovski
Chris Pavlovski
Founder, Chairman, & CEO at Rumble

Thanks, Shannon. Let's get right to it. Many of you yesterday saw the press release regarding our intent to acquire AI company Northern Data. I'm not going to be able to discuss that potential transaction during this briefing or answer any questions in the Q and A session. I will be limiting my remarks to the following.

Chris Pavlovski
Chris Pavlovski
Founder, Chairman, & CEO at Rumble

As noted on our last earnings call, our management team is very seriously focused on M and A strategy and evaluating strategic opportunities as they come. The announcement this morning is consistent with our ongoing pursuit of these opportunities. As described in the press release, Northern Data is a leading provider of AI and high performance computing solutions and operates primarily through Ardent, its data center business and Tyga, its GPU as a service business. Rumble has informed Northern Data that it is interested in pursuing a potential exchange offer in which the shareholders of Northern Data would receive newly issued Class A shares of Rumble common stock in exchange for their Northern Data shares. Rumble has received positive feedback from Tether, the majority shareholder of Northern Data.

Chris Pavlovski
Chris Pavlovski
Founder, Chairman, & CEO at Rumble

With respect to the potential offer on the preliminary terms described in the press respect to the preliminary terms described in the press release. It is important to note that Rumble has not made a final decision yet to launch the potential offer and still needs to complete additional work. The contemplated transaction, if pursued and completed, would be the latest step towards a shared vision between Tether and Rumble to democratize compute while providing unfettered access to infrastructure. This would be achieved by the delivery of GPU as a service and data center power, both of which would leverage Rumble's existing high growth cloud business. Before we move on, please note that this offer is preliminary and subject to additional work, negotiation and finalization of key terms.

Chris Pavlovski
Chris Pavlovski
Founder, Chairman, & CEO at Rumble

I encourage everyone to review our press release for further information, including certain risks, conditions and uncertainties relating to the potential offer. As you can imagine, the excitement internally at Rumble is hard to hold back. Rumble is embarking on new frontiers backed by what I believe to be one of the most innovative and forward thinking companies in the world, Tether. This is driving a completely new mandate for Rumble. The second quarter was a foundational quarter for Rumble.

Chris Pavlovski
Chris Pavlovski
Founder, Chairman, & CEO at Rumble

From a user perspective, we held strong at 51,000,000 MAUs, our eighth consecutive quarter above the 50,000,000 mark and when compared to Google Universal Analytics Q2 twenty twenty three number, which was post midterm elections, we are noticeably up. Most importantly, this was our first full quarter without Americas and Rumble's largest live streamer, Dan Bongino. Dan's transition to the administration speaks to his leadership. And while we're incredibly proud and supportive of journey, the real story is this, Rumble didn't miss a beat. That speaks volumes about the depth of our creator base and the stickiness of our platform.

Chris Pavlovski
Chris Pavlovski
Founder, Chairman, & CEO at Rumble

From a monetization perspective, we delivered $25,100,000 in revenue, up about 12% year over year and also up sequentially quarter over quarter, a result I'm incredibly proud of, especially as we lap the election year surge. On our previous calls, I discussed the vibe shift in corporate America as a potential tailwind for our business fueling our growth. Although we are still early, this critical transition is manifesting itself in unique ways. I previously mentioned some early progress with brands such as Chevron, which has committed to re upping their campaign and America's largest injury firm, Morgan and Morgan, onboarded in Q2. This quarter, we saw a major theme, partnerships.

Chris Pavlovski
Chris Pavlovski
Founder, Chairman, & CEO at Rumble

Just like the uphill battle of brands, it has been very challenging to build out partnerships with other companies, which forced us to find growth in isolation. Now in this new environment, we are creating an ecosystem and making meaningful progress in building out partnerships that will lay a strong foundation for growth. For the first time, I can say it feels like we have increasing momentum in this aspect of our business. Let me highlight a few wins. First, Cumulus Media.

Chris Pavlovski
Chris Pavlovski
Founder, Chairman, & CEO at Rumble

We've inked a strategic partnership spanning Cumulus radio stations, Westwood One and the Cumulus podcast network. This is a multi pronged partnership allows our respective sales teams to work hand in hand unlocking new ad opportunities while bringing Cumulus premium content to Rumble. Second, we've signed a broad ranging agreement with a leading AI player from an advertising partnership to a tech integration. This is not related to last night's announcement, but continues to demonstrate how bold, ambitious and committed we are on the AI front. We'll be providing more details later in the quarter, but this is the most we can say about that at this moment.

Chris Pavlovski
Chris Pavlovski
Founder, Chairman, & CEO at Rumble

Now Tether, no partnership has more overall impact right now. In the second quarter, Tether began advertising on Rumble and is helping accelerating accelerate our most exciting upcoming launch, the Rumble Wallet. Launching in Q3, Rumble Wallet will be a non custodial wallet used initially for tipping creators on the Rumble video platform with Bitcoin, Tethers USDT and Tethr Gold. For those unfamiliar with non custodial wallets, they allow you to directly own your cryptocurrencies and are not reliant on a centralized authority for access. This shared decentralization decentralized philosophy is a cornerstone of the Rumble Tether partnership.

Chris Pavlovski
Chris Pavlovski
Founder, Chairman, & CEO at Rumble

As we launch Rumble Wallet, we plan to activate the full Rumble community and also get very aggressive with onboarding new creators. We will do this by leveraging Rumble Studio to enable promotional Rumble Wallet ad reads at scale. Think about how everyone wins here. On one side, creators use Rumble Studio to multistream to all platforms including Rumble. They then perform Rumble Wallet ad reads to generate revenue.

Chris Pavlovski
Chris Pavlovski
Founder, Chairman, & CEO at Rumble

On the flip side, Rumble side, more people are streaming to Rumble, more people are watching content on Rumble and Rumble Wallet is being promoted and endorsed across the Internet. As previously stated, Tether has already begun advertising in Q2 with Rumble. With Rumble Wallet, we anticipate that this will grow in future quarters. As you can imagine, we believe and anticipate Rumble Wallet will ignite growth for Rumble's video platform, both domestically and internationally. As part of this launch, in keeping with our theme of partnerships, I want to discuss MoonPay.

Chris Pavlovski
Chris Pavlovski
Founder, Chairman, & CEO at Rumble

MoonPay will power all crypto on and off ramps within RumbleWallet, enabling seamless buy, sell and swap functionality. MoonPay's creative agency, Otherlife, will also leverage Rumble Cloud for next gen object storage and decentralized compute. Bottom line, partnerships are no longer a someday goal. They're here, they're expanding and they're creating a meaningful foundation for our next phase of growth. Finally, this leads me to Rumble Cloud and AI.

Chris Pavlovski
Chris Pavlovski
Founder, Chairman, & CEO at Rumble

This has obviously been a huge focus of ours. It is clear that AI is going to change the world and if anyone is not aggressively getting into this space, they'll become irrelevant very quickly. We have very ambitious plans around this space, particularly how it pertains to our cloud business, which I believe to be the most underappreciated part of our business today. To sum it up, our core business continues to demonstrate its stickiness despite coming off a monumental election year. We made significant strides with a diverse set of partnerships to set us up for future growth.

Chris Pavlovski
Chris Pavlovski
Founder, Chairman, & CEO at Rumble

We continue to expand our partnership with Tether, which is aligned with our long term vision. And with Rumble Wallet launching soon, we're accelerating a new phase of growth. Since the transaction with Tether closed, our mandate has changed. YouTube has Google, CoreWeave has Microsoft, Anthropic has Amazon and now Rumble has Tether. We've always been ambitious, but today we're in a new position.

Chris Pavlovski
Chris Pavlovski
Founder, Chairman, & CEO at Rumble

Our mandate is growth and unlike Big Tech, it will be aggressive growth while also protecting a free and open Internet. With that, I'll turn it over to Brandon to walk through the financials.

Brandon Alexandroff
Brandon Alexandroff
CFO at Rumble

Thanks, Chris. I'll now take you through our second quarter twenty twenty five financials at a very high level before turning the call over to the operator for Q and A. We reported revenues of $25,100,000 a 12% increase year over year. This growth was primarily driven by a $1,700,000 increase in audience monetization revenues and a $900,000 increase in other initiatives. The increase in audience monetization revenue is due to an increase from Rumble Premium and local subscriptions, licensing and tipping offset by advertising revenue.

Brandon Alexandroff
Brandon Alexandroff
CFO at Rumble

Revenue from other initiatives grew $900,000 reflecting further traction in our cloud business. ARPU increased to $0.42 up 24% sequentially, a positive indicator of our enhanced monetization strategy attributable to higher subscription and licensing revenue. Cost of services improved 26% year over year to $26,500,000 primarily from a $10,100,000 reduction in programming and content expenses, partially offset by $1,000,000 increase in other costs including publisher fees and payment processing. The decrease is primarily due to the expiration of various programming and content agreements. Adjusted EBITDA loss improved to $20,500,000 compared to a loss of $28,700,000 last year, an $8,200,000 improvement primarily related to the previously mentioned increase in revenue and expiration of programming and content agreements.

Brandon Alexandroff
Brandon Alexandroff
CFO at Rumble

We ended the quarter with total liquidity of $306,400,000 including $283,800,000 in cash and cash equivalents and $22,600,000 in Bitcoin Holdings. Our Bitcoin Holdings are carried at fair value and remeasured each quarter. Also, as it relates to cash, we used $17,500,000 of cash and cash equivalents during the quarter. We have always been cautiously ambitious with capital deployment. As Chris mentioned, today we're in a different position.

Brandon Alexandroff
Brandon Alexandroff
CFO at Rumble

With the incredible backing from Tether and significant resources at our disposal, we believe we have the opportunity to evaluate investing in aggressive growth. That concludes my prepared remarks. Before I turn the call over to the operator, I invite you all to join Chris this afternoon at one p. M. Eastern Time in an exclusive post earnings interview with Matt Kors to be streamed live on the Matt Kors Rumble channel.

Brandon Alexandroff
Brandon Alexandroff
CFO at Rumble

Operator, we're now ready to open the line for questions.

Operator

Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question and answer session.

Operator

Your first question comes from the line of Jason Hefstein from Oppenheimer. Please go ahead.

Jason Helfstein
MD & Head - Internet at Oppenheimer & Co. Inc.

Hey, everybody. I've got a few questions. So just maybe let me last one at a time. So you saw a nice advertising growth in the second quarter. Can you give us an update on RAC?

Jason Helfstein
MD & Head - Internet at Oppenheimer & Co. Inc.

When could we see an acceleration in advertising? And this is all one question, a long one. And then Chris, you didn't really talk that much about advertising in your prepared remarks. Should we assume or should investors assume that advertising is going to become a lower priority post the Northern Data announcement and your comments about Tether? So that's question one. And then two more follow ups.

Chris Pavlovski
Chris Pavlovski
Founder, Chairman, & CEO at Rumble

Hey, Jason, this is Chris. The answer to the latter part of your question is no. Advertising will be still a very high priority here. And in fact, we're seeing signs, a lot of signs that CPMs can start should start moving up as we go into future quarters and in future years. But specifically to answer your question about RAC, one of the things that RAC was lacking prior to, I would say, 2025 is that we didn't really have the ability to connect with the SSPs and be able to bring our advertising inventory outside of our network and be able to monetize that well on other publishing sites as well.

Chris Pavlovski
Chris Pavlovski
Founder, Chairman, & CEO at Rumble

What we're seeing now in Q2, most specifically in Q3, is that we're seeing a lot more publisher inventory come into Rack and we're also thinking partnerships with SSPs like PubMatic, etcetera. So there's a lot of partnership activity happening right now in the background of RAC both on both ends of the advertising and the inventory side. So I would I actually see it as a very big potential growth opportunity in the coming quarters and years for us. And it's definitely something that is extremely high priority within the company.

Jason Helfstein
MD & Head - Internet at Oppenheimer & Co. Inc.

Okay. And then just on your comment about creators, looking to onboard meaningfully more creators. I guess the question is, are you looking to find creators who are like not monetizing on their existing platforms? Or that you plan to offer better monetization terms or both? Like I mean, seems like I guess it's like where are these content creators going to come from and kind of how do you get them to join?

Chris Pavlovski
Chris Pavlovski
Founder, Chairman, & CEO at Rumble

Yes. So there's multiple different mousetraps that we can use, particularly the main mousetrap will be Rumble Studio. So we won't be asking creators to come exclusively, we'll be asking them to use Rumble Studio where they can stream multi stream across multiple different platforms. And the major benefit here is that they will get paid to start promoting the Rumble wallet, and that will give them a huge incentive to use Studio and obviously, they're generating revenue. So we see that as a real opportunity to kind of grow that creator portfolio in a very meaningful way.

Chris Pavlovski
Chris Pavlovski
Founder, Chairman, & CEO at Rumble

And obviously, this being backed by Tether makes it much easier on our side to execute. So I see this as a this is like a big plan internally for us. We're scoping that out as we speak right now. We're looking at which creators we want to target, which creators we want on board. Obviously, the Rumble creators are going to have this readily available to them.

Chris Pavlovski
Chris Pavlovski
Founder, Chairman, & CEO at Rumble

But what's really exciting is all the ones that are not on Rumble that we're going to target and we're hearing interest that they're very interested in joining and becoming part of this. So the marketing initiative around this both by Rumble and Tether to deploy the Rumble wallet is what's got everyone like super excited internally.

Jason Helfstein
MD & Head - Internet at Oppenheimer & Co. Inc.

Okay. And last one, just Brandon, on gross profit losses improved meaningfully in the second quarter. Are we on track for positive gross profit in the second half? And can you talk about the path to positive EBITDA and free cash flow from here? Thanks.

Brandon Alexandroff
Brandon Alexandroff
CFO at Rumble

Yes. Hey, Jason. Yes, so with the financial resources that we now have in place, as well as our strong partnerships and resulting cash position, materially moving towards adjusted EBITDA breakeven, it's still important that we've spoken about before, but it's become a lesser relative priority as we evaluate investing into aggressive growth.

Jason Helfstein
MD & Head - Internet at Oppenheimer & Co. Inc.

Okay. Any comments around gross profit margins like rest of the year or just gross profit?

Brandon Alexandroff
Brandon Alexandroff
CFO at Rumble

Not planning on giving guidance around that specifically. But yes, you clearly saw an improvement this quarter as some of the larger creator agreements started to expire. And so we are going to continue to evaluate our optionality going forward.

Jason Helfstein
MD & Head - Internet at Oppenheimer & Co. Inc.

Okay, thanks. I'll jump back in the queue and look forward to talking to you guys at our fireside.

Operator

Your next question is from the line of Francisco Marmo from Maxim Group. Please go ahead.

Francesco Marmo
Consumer Internet Analyst at Maxim Group

Hi, good morning everybody. Thank you for taking my question and congrats on the quarter. One two fold question first on audience monetization and then one quick follow-up. So on audience monetization, first part is MAU evolving the way you were expecting to? I understand there's a lot of factors, political and non political, that kind of impact that and that cyclicality, but how is the evolution of MAU coming through compared to your internal expectation?

Francesco Marmo
Consumer Internet Analyst at Maxim Group

And then the second side of that question is on ARPU. That 14% growth in ARPU is quite impressive. And I really appreciate the color around the growth in subscription. And I was wondering whether you guys could give us some color as of the initiatives that you guys are pursuing to get these results. Thank you.

Chris Pavlovski
Chris Pavlovski
Founder, Chairman, & CEO at Rumble

Hi, Francesco, this is Chris. With respect to the MAUs, I would say we were very me personally, I was very impressed by the MAU number in Q2 only because when putting it against last year in an election year where politics and primaries were central focus, we don't really have that this year. And more importantly, we lost our largest creator on the platform, Dan Bongino. So to be able to put growth year over to put 51,000,000 which is growth over the midterm post midterm election Q2 number in 2023. I see that as a major win for us, especially not having Dan Bongino on the platform and not being in being in a year that's absolutely as it doesn't have the same kind of election surge that you would see last year from primaries in the presidential election.

Chris Pavlovski
Chris Pavlovski
Founder, Chairman, & CEO at Rumble

So for me and the team, this was a very big number to accomplish with for having a clean quarter without Dan. On the ARPU side, I would say, one of the things that we've done really well since late last year is the execution of Rumble Premium and you're starting to see that kind of take effect and hit on the very well. So in order for Rumble Premium to have gone to where it is today, what had to happen is we had to start bringing in mid rolls and more audience monetization across the platform. And as we started bringing in more audience monetization across the platform through Rack, that's also propelled Rumble Premium. So we're kind of seeing like a nice feedback loop there with respect to advertising and subscription.

Chris Pavlovski
Chris Pavlovski
Founder, Chairman, & CEO at Rumble

And it's really proving out to have a really good flywheel effect. So I would we're very, very confident that in the next couple of quarters and as we get to the lighter half of this year as CPM start moving up and advertiser demand starts increasing getting into the Q4 quarter, we'll see impact there.

Francesco Marmo
Consumer Internet Analyst at Maxim Group

Great. Thank you very much. That was extremely clear. And then one quick follow-up on the Rumble Wallet marketing initiatives. I assume that most of the initiatives clearly are going to take place on the Rumble platform.

Francesco Marmo
Consumer Internet Analyst at Maxim Group

Did you mention that you're going to collaborate with your own creators? Is that going to be kind of the is that the main marketing approach you guys have planned?

Chris Pavlovski
Chris Pavlovski
Founder, Chairman, & CEO at Rumble

So the marketing approach we have planned is definitely we're going to be using the creators on Rumble and they'll be a big part of it. But we're definitely going to be looking off Rumble as well on the marketing approach and other platforms to use Studio and be able to promote and endorse the Rumble wallet and push the Rumble wallet. So we're going to look very, very heavily off platform. And I would imagine that would help bring in more creators to Rumble, and we'll probably see more budget platform just generally because it's so much larger as a TAM outside of Rumble. We'll be spending a lot outside of Rumble as well.

Chris Pavlovski
Chris Pavlovski
Founder, Chairman, & CEO at Rumble

But yes, the Rumble creators will be a big participant in this and a huge driver for us, but we're also looking forward to tapping into audiences that we don't currently have and bringing them on to Rumble. It's really important to note that we Rumble Wallet isn't just about bringing it growing Rumble Wallet per se, it's also a mechanism in which we think will drive growth towards rumble.com, the video platform, because of the tipping, because we'll be the first platform of this size to be doing BTC tips, USDT tips and because it will be a great advertising vehicle for creators on Rumble.

Francesco Marmo
Consumer Internet Analyst at Maxim Group

Exact thank you so much. That that that that's such a great answer. Like, that's exactly the question I had in mind because, you're gonna have that double effect for the for the wallet itself, but then also a marketing opportunity for the platform itself. Is that a right way of thinking of it?

Chris Pavlovski
Chris Pavlovski
Founder, Chairman, & CEO at Rumble

Yes, absolutely. It's really it really should drive Rumble itself. And one of the places where I think it will drive it more and where we have like so much market opportunity is international. We have no presence international, but this will take us very international. And I anticipate to see a lot of growth internationally once we launch this.

Chris Pavlovski
Chris Pavlovski
Founder, Chairman, & CEO at Rumble

This is something that we've never really focused on before, but we have a really sizable audience here in The United States. But we plan to really kind of have presence outside of The United States with the Rumble wallet. And that backs into rumble.com more than anything. And that's what kind of gets us all really excited. We're hoping for MAU growth internationally.

Chris Pavlovski
Chris Pavlovski
Founder, Chairman, & CEO at Rumble

We're hoping for just a ton more usage of Rumble across international and domestic markets because the Rumble wallet will be the catalyst for that.

Francesco Marmo
Consumer Internet Analyst at Maxim Group

Great. Thank you very much.

Operator

Your next question is from the line of Jason Hefstein from Oppenheimer. Please go ahead.

Jason Helfstein
MD & Head - Internet at Oppenheimer & Co. Inc.

I guess I figured I'd ask a follow-up. Chris, just to your point that you think your current cloud business is kind of underappreciated, under recognized, is there a way to size how big again, not from a revenue standpoint, maybe some kind of technical capacity standpoint, how big your cloud capacity is today versus that of Northern Data?

Chris Pavlovski
Chris Pavlovski
Founder, Chairman, & CEO at Rumble

Yes. I'm not going to get into too much with respect to Northern Data. But what I can say about the current Rumble Cloud is we're seeing like very quite a lot of interest, and this is coming from not just governments and countries. We're also starting to see interest from large corporate entities. We've now entered into RFP processes with multiple governments and corporate entities.

Chris Pavlovski
Chris Pavlovski
Founder, Chairman, & CEO at Rumble

And what we're noticing is that we're in groups that include Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Rumble, and it's just like the four of us and maybe another player. We're starting to see that we're in these peer groups and we're starting to compete against them. And we're talking very, very large opportunities. And just like we did with El Salvador, we're starting to work with them. We anticipate that this could snowball into becoming something much larger in the next year or two.

Chris Pavlovski
Chris Pavlovski
Founder, Chairman, & CEO at Rumble

And as you know, these RFP processes are long, especially when it comes to governments, it takes time. But we're in the middle of a lot of these and that's got us really, really excited and I think it's something that the market doesn't quite see what's happening in the background, but in the middle of some pretty interesting RFPs.

Jason Helfstein
MD & Head - Internet at Oppenheimer & Co. Inc.

Appreciate the color. Thank you.

Operator

There are no further questions at this time. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you very much for your participation. You may now disconnect.

Executives
Analysts
    • Jason Helfstein
      MD & Head - Internet at Oppenheimer & Co. Inc.
    • Francesco Marmo
      Consumer Internet Analyst at Maxim Group