To be clear, this interview is several months old, and Rumble $RUM, which has since disclosed that its user base fell 40% in a single quarter, has zero business relationship with Tucker Carlson, who is moving to Twitter. But keep pumping, @chrispavlovski.
May 18, 2023, 6:38 p.m.
@chrispavlovski 6/6) Finally, $RUM touts newly-signed content deals, claiming creators are attracted to Rumble's "authenticity." Again BS: Rumble is paying out hundreds in millions in content costs. We continue to believe this is a doomed strategy, and we remain short.
May 16, 2023, 1:40 p.m.
13/13) $RUM is now being sued by a former investor for $400M, as he alleges Pavlovski cheated him out of his 20% stake in the Company. Any potential settlement could put a substantial dent in the Company's dwindling cash balance. We're short and think shares are headed lower.
April 27, 2023, 2:05 p.m.
11) $RUM claims to be built for small creators, but actions speak louder than words: $RUM instead bleeds out guaranteed money to big names. A former $RUM exec told us that "those deals are mostly going to be underwater." Gross margins were -18% in Q4 and cash burn is ballooning.
April 27, 2023, 2:04 p.m.
10) $RUM also stakes its promotion on the claim that it owns its own data centers and is insulated from "Big Tech" such as AWS. Pavlovski even claimed "we've never relied on a single cloud infrastructure provider out there." This is garbage: $RUM's IR team even told us so.
April 27, 2023, 2:04 p.m.
9) $RUM's ad tech is stuck in the stone age, which is why advertisers are largely scam artists: $RUM's single largest outbound site is "Exipure", an obvious weight loss supplement scam. $RUM's not even "bare bones" tech has put a lid on monetization, and the platform is doomed.
April 27, 2023, 2:03 p.m.
8) $RUM now appears to rely substantially on malware to drive inbound site interest. We estimate 37% of site traffic in March 2023 (most recent available) was driven by adware redirect programs rather than genuine human interest. Unsurprisingly, advertisers are skeptical of $RUM.
April 27, 2023, 2:02 p.m.
7) We think Pavlovski accidently admitted to $RUM's paltry user base in a Nov 2020 talk. He stated Parler grew to 5-10M users in Nov 2020, "significantly more" than $RUM. However, $RUM then claimed 21M MAUs in Q4 2020, clashing with those remarks and independent traffic data.
April 27, 2023, 2:02 p.m.
6) $RUM CEO Pavlovski appears to have lied before. In Feb 2018, he said $RUM had 100M MAUs, then a Nov 2020 profile said $RUM grew from 40M to 80M users. $RUM's SPAC prospectus then showed just 1.6M MAUs for Q3 2020, suggesting that Pavlovski is just making it all up as he goes.
April 27, 2023, 2:01 p.m.
5) $RUM claimed in SPAC prospectuses that MAUs were tied to unique users, but now admits it cannot actually track. A former $RUM exec told us straight up that $RUM double-, triple-, and quadruple-counts users: "If I have four devices, then that counts as four different accounts."
April 27, 2023, 2:01 p.m.
4) $RUM's MAU claims also fail to square with leading consumer tech co's. For ex: $RUM claims to be the same size as Twitter in the US, yet generates just 4% of the US-based traffic; $RUM claims imply it's 57% the size of Twitch, yet leading metrics suggest it's more like 10%.
April 27, 2023, 2:01 p.m.
2) With little revenue generation ability, $RUM's promotion is premised on its claim to have grown to 80M MAUs. But based on numerous sources of independent website traffic and app data, we think this 80M number is a mirage, and $RUM overstates its user base by 66% to 108%.
April 27, 2023, 2 p.m.
