The CEO of Rumble, a platform which is taking on YouTube as an alternative, said that the platform was seeing “tremendous growth.”
Rumble’s monthly user count has gone from 1.6 million users in 2020 around the US election time to 31.9 million by the end of the first quarter of 2021.
The CEO Chris Pavlovski launched the platform back in 2013 with an aim to provide “video creators a way to host, manage, distribute and monetize their content.” The company believes in providing small creators “equal opportunity” for expressing themselves freely and giving them the same set of tools that large creators have access to.
The sudden rise in the users in Rumble’s case could be explained by the banning of President Trump and many users from Big Tech social media platforms in recent times.
Pavlovski, while providing average viewing times, said that 4.5 billion minutes were watched by the first quarter in 2021, compared to the 188 million back in the third quarter of 2020.
He said that the platform was built to support all small creators, regardless of whether they belonged to the right or left. “My goal is to keep it as fair as possible. We’re not interested in taking any position on any type of content, we just want to be a platform, and I believe that’s why we’ve seen so much growth,” Pavlovski said to Fox Business.
The platform, backed by political commentator Dan Bongino, who has also experienced much Big Tech censorship, furthermore, does not amplify any comment based on its popularity or reactions it has earned. “There is no amplification of any kind,” Rumble’s CEO said.
Rampant censorship of users on Big Tech platforms, especially around election times, has persuaded a number of Republicans to move on to using alternate platforms such as Rumble.
Pavlovski says that Big Tech, mainstream platforms were not helping small creators and have been prioritizing content based on their preferences. That is the gap that Rumble plans on bridging.
“By 2020 and 2021, large platforms were prioritizing content they want to amplify – not by small creators. That exodus has been happening in the last year at a pace that I think will set in stone for the long term—those small creators are fed up with the larger platforms and are looking for an alternative solution— and I think they found it in Rumble,” said Pavlovski.
