Rumble Inc. Q1 FY2025 earnings call

• Video business: MAUs of $59M in Q1, 87% retention from Q4, 13 consecutive quarters over 40M MAUs and 7 over 50M.
• Advertising business: Starting to see traction with partnerships like Netflix, Crypto.com, and Chevron, exploring programmatic and AI tools for RAC.
• Rumble Wallet: Aiming to launch in Q3 2025, with plans to partner with major crypto exchanges and localize the Rumble Video product for international markets.
• Cloud business: Partnership with the Government of El Salvador and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, showing potential in government and sports verticals.
• M&A strategy: Management team focused on evaluating strategic M&A opportunities.

For the first quarter of 2025, Rumble reported revenues of $23.7 million, a 34% increase compared to Q1 2024. The Video segment had MAUs of $59 million, with 87% retention from Q4, marking 13 consecutive quarters over 40M MAUs and 7 over 50M. The Advertising segment is seeing traction with partnerships like Netflix, Crypto.com, and Chevron, and is exploring programmatic and AI tools. The Cloud segment had a partnership with the Government of El Salvador and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Revenue contribution: Video, Advertising, and Cloud segments each contributed to the overall growth, with video revenue growth driven by subscription and tipping fees, advertising by new partnerships, and cloud by service offerings.

• Adjusted EBITDA loss for Q1 2025 was $22.7M, a 14% improvement from Q1 2024.
• Expect to move materially towards adjusted EBITDA breakeven in 2025, with increased flexibility from Tether investment to invest in growth initiatives sooner.

Q: Hey guys, I wanted to ask a little bit about the Bitcoin efforts and the Wallet. First, what ultimately are you trying to accomplish with the Bitcoin treasury in terms of how you think of acquiring Bitcoin in relation to traditional cash and where you're comfortable taking Bitcoin levels to relative to the needs to possibly have more liquidity in terms of cash? Are you thinking of them similarly in terms of being one exchange for the other so you can use the Bitcoin to fund the business when you need it as well? I'm just a little curious about that given the differences in the volatility.

A: Thanks for the question. This is Chris. With respect to the treasury, our board approved up to $20 million of purchasing for the Bitcoin treasury. There is no further strategy outside of that that we've announced at this point right now. But this kind of dovetails into the strategy that we have with the Rumble Wallet. As we launch the Rumble Wallet, we're really looking to use that as one of the tools for the creator economy where people can tip and subscribe and transact, especially in international markets, to their favorite creators and creators can use these wallets as a form of payment, a form of receiving payment, et cetera. As that becomes a very important part of our business when we launch the wallet later this year in Q3, that's one of the strategies behind having a treasury so that we can be able to hold more and further bitcoin with respect to that.

Q: Got it. But no ambitions at the moment anyway that you've discussed about raising the ratio of bitcoin relative to the cash position beyond levels that it currently resides at?

A: We're continuing to evaluate that and we haven't really made any determinations on that quite yet. But at this point right now, the only thing that we've approved is that the board level is up to $20 million of purchasing.

Q: Okay. And then on the Wallet, can you just walk through the go-to-market or the use case for the user in terms of what are the reasons, one, two, three, why a user ultimately will adopt the Rumble Wallet to store their crypto and utilize it for the functionality that it provides versus Coinbase or others in the market? And kind of how you think about that, where you fit in the market and why.

A: So one of the demands that we have on the creator side is to get paid in Bitcoin or get paid in a Ctablecoin. And there's obviously a huge demand for that on the creator end and the creators that adopt Rumble have a huge trust factor with Rumble. So we believe that Rumble would be one of their most prominent places to hold and store with a Rumble non-custodial wallet. In addition to that, when you start exploring these international markets, you start to notice that a lot of the viewers will transact in crypto rather than, let's say, typical visas that you see here in North America. So we think this is a really good strategy to monetize international users as we go international. And this is going to require a lot of work, and we're working on this as we speak right now, and localizing, using AI to help localize the entire Rumble app and all the Rumble content and be able to go to these markets and serve these different markets. But we do believe that USD Tether, with their amount of users around the world, we can very easily tap into that and bring a lot of that revenue into the creator economy. So I would say, starting from the top, the demand from the creators is number one. Number two is the demand from the users. And this would be the first platform that I know of that attacks this market in the way that we're going to do it with the Wallet.

Q: And last question, given this is still relatively new, and historically you've had the cloud business and the content business and the overlay increasingly of monetization efforts on the content business. How do you think about Bitcoin, crypto, the wallet, in terms of how integral it is to the business in coming years relative to what the operating business was prior to that?

A: I don't believe this changes the operating business at all. I think this complements the business in its entirety. We're seeing a lot of demand from crypto customers on cloud. We have a significant one actually testing it right now. And then in addition to that, it's a tool that creators and our viewers actually want. A lot of these creators desire getting tips in Bitcoin. It's a very desirable way of getting paid for creators, and it's something that I believe will give us a real competitive advantage over YouTube. Having this on our platform is something that YouTube does not have, and creators in general are very, very pro-Bitcoin, especially the crowd that you find on Rumble. So we see this as extremely complimentary, not distracting at all, and it just drives home with our current ethos.

Q: Hi, everybody. Thank you for taking my question. Congratulations on the quarter. Two quick questions from me, if I may. First of all, on the brand partnership side, great news. I was wondering whether you guys could share a bit more details on the partnerships, maybe the scope, the duration, and maybe if you already have some initial feedback either from the brand or the users.

A: In terms of the only one brand campaign completed, and we received very positive feedback on that one brand campaign. That was with Netflix. And currently ongoing right now, we have Chevron, and we have Crypto.com, so we're hoping to get more feedback in the coming weeks and months on that. This is to me, a major win. This is not something I was able to talk much about in the past. We never really had brand advertisers, and all of a sudden now that's something we're talking about. It's a huge win for Rumble. And it happened right after the elections, which I think says a lot. And I hope to see a lot more of that as the months progress.

Q: That's amazing. And we do look forward to hear more as the partnerships evolve. And then the second question on M&A, super, super high level, very interesting comment in the opening remarks. I was wondering whether you guys could give us a sense in terms of what you're thinking, what kind of assets maybe, what kind of verticals or what kind of capabilities you would be interested to add on.

A: I can't provide any more information other than what I already said. We're going to look at opportunities as they come. And this is a very important focus for us in the current year.