Rumble’s new advertising platform, Rumble Advertising Center, was launched as an alternative to those creators and businesses targeted by blacklisting, alarmingly frequently for political reasons.
The most egregious example is the most powerful of the groups accused of such practices: the World Economic Forum-affiliated Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM).
While GARM maintains that its sole purpose is to provide “brand safety,” critics see it as a censorship tool, particularly undermining voices, allegedly going as far as to organize boycotts aimed against entire platforms (and the US House Judiciary Committee is investigating these claims).
Rumble’s reaction to this situation is to provide an alternative, with CEO Chris Pavlovski explaining in an interview with Breitbart at the Republican National Convention (RNC) that he views GARM as an “advertising cartel” and that he has been aware that his platform would struggle where advertising is concerned because of its focus on free speech.
That kind of focus, Pavlovski says, brings with it the risk of facing a boycott that results in large companies not spending money with a given platform.
The Rumble CEO went on to liken this sequence of events to a “conspiracy” – but also the point at which his company realized it would not be able to rely on a monopoly-style system like Google, or Fortune 500 companies for monetization and ad revenue.
That’s how the Rumble Advertising Center came to be – and its policies are shared with the video platform itself, Pavlovski said.
“Just be neutral. Be fair. Don’t treat anybody any differently because of their political views or biases,” the Rumble chief said of the Center, which he describes as part of the Rumble ecosystem necessary to compete against what he sees as cartels and monopolies.
Speaking of creating an ecosystem, he noted that another piece of the puzzle, and an important one, is Rumble Cloud – the infrastructure now spanning the US.
“We know that if we’re running off somebody else’s tech, then we’re very susceptible to them pushing us around the same way (as ad companies with political agendas),” he noted, stressing the importance of self-reliance both in terms of infrastructure and monetization, and reiterating that Rumble wants to be a platform for free expression, without any inherent bias.
