Conservative YouTube Competitor Rumble Seals 6-Figure Content Deals With Tulsi Gabbard, Glenn Greenwald

Rumble, a video site that positions itself as a safe haven from people who think they’re oppressed by “Big Tech,” has reportedly sealed six-figure content deals with well-known political figures in an effort to bolster its user base.

Former Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard and journalist Glenn Greenwald are among those who will be paid to produce videos that “challenge the status quo,” The Washington Post reports.

Deals mandate that they must post all new video content to the Toronto-headquartered Rumble first, with a two-hour exclusivity window. After that two hours is up, they can crosspost videos wherever they want.

Greenwald, a frequent face on Fox News, told the Post that joining Rumble means “liberating ourselves from the control and oppression of Big Tech monopolies’ censorship and tyranny.”

“Unlike YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, which began wildly expanding how the rules are applied for broader society to remove so-called ‘disinformation,’ Rumble just stayed true to the original mission,” he said. “You can’t go on there and say racist stuff, but they don’t monitor for what’s true or false. They really believe in true debate.”

Rumble notoriously refuses to remove the kind of false and conspiracy-leaning content that YouTube has struggled for years to eradicate from its platform. And, in fact, it may actively promote lies: a recent study by Wired

found that if you search “vaccine” on Rumble, you’re three times more likely to be recommended videos containing lies (for example, that the COVID-19 vaccine will kill you) than videos containing accurate information. If you search for “election,” you’re twice as likely to be recommended false information than factual content.

Greenwald told the Post that Rumble reached out to him in midsummer, asking him to produce high-quality videos in exchange for a “mirange six figures” sum. His content was meant to show potential users that Rumble can be “a hospitable place for non-MAGA people,” he said.

Over the past year, Rumble’s traffic has grown significantly. Founder Chris Pavlovski told the Post it went from one million active users in 2020 to around 30 million now. From September 2020 to January 2021, it jumped from 5 million to 135 million monthly site visits, per Wired.

As the Post points out, numerous conservative figureheads have Rumble accounts, including Donald Trump and Republican representative Matt Gaetz, who is being investigated by the Department of Justice and House Ethics Committee for allegedly sex-trafficking a minor.

Rumble launched in 2013 and recently raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Narya Capital, an Ohio-based venture capital firm cofounded by Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance and PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel.