During an interview with lawyer Viva Frei, Chris Pavlovski, the CEO of video-sharing platform Rumble, revealed that he and the Rumble team plan to bring much-requested features including live streaming, playlists, and a new monetization system to the platform in 2021.
“Both monetization across the platform and live streaming are two major priorities for us in 2021,” Pavlovski said.
He added that Rumble is about two weeks away from having the capabilities to fully support live streaming. However, the cost of rolling out live streaming to all users is something the company has to consider during the rollout.
“We have a plan, we’re gonna launch it, we’re gonna roll it out slowly in 2021, hopefully, early 2021,” Pavlovski stated. “We’ll definitely have it. The question is how we’re going to be able to offer it on a free basis to everyone like our competition does.”
Pavlovski also discussed Rumble’s 2021 plans for building a “strong monetization platform” and detailed how Rumble ultimately intends to create its own internal ad platform that’s similar to Facebook and Snapchat’s ad system. He added that the creation of this internal ad platform would give Rumble more control over ads while also providing more privacy for users.
Playlists were the third upcoming feature that Pavlovski touched on during the interview. Rumble currently supports playlist functionality when its video player is embedded on user’s websites. However, Pavlovski said that playlists will be coming to the main Rumble site in 2021.
The announcement of these new features follows Rumble enjoying explosive growth this year. Much of this growth has been driven by YouTube’s far-reaching censorship policies which have resulted in videos that challenge or question the opinions of mainstream media outlets and health authorities being restricted or removed.
In the face of this mounting YouTube censorship, Rumble has taken the opposite approach and promised to foster “dialog, debates and opinions.” This has resulted in several popular influencers, including the conservative commentator Dan Bongino, who has an ownership stake in the platform, and One America News (OAN), embracing Rumble and helping to boost the popularity of the platform.
Pavlovski reiterated Rumble’s commitment to supporting open debate and discussion in this interview.
“This is wrong,” Pavlovski said when discussing YouTube’s increased censorship of scientific discussions and debate. “Rumble is not here to be an arbiter of truth.”
He also slammed YouTube for censoring opinions and vowed to never censor political discussion or opinions on Rumble. Additionally, Pavlovski promised that the platform would not be changing its policies “every two weeks” – a reference to YouTube’s increasingly frequent terms of service updates that restrict what users are allowed to post.
Watch the interview here.
