The 2024 election turned into a reckoning for the American left, with a red wave spreading across the country on November 5. The reelection of President Donald Trump also affected the tech ecosystem as conservative platforms and creators enjoyed Election Day viewership spikes.
No platform exemplifies that trend better than Rumble. The streaming hub that brands itself as a haven for free speech and right-wing positions enjoyed its best day ever on November 5, when its platform-wide peak traffic reached a new high of 1.79 million viewers.
According to Streams Charts, which tracks viewership data across major platforms, this is the third time in 2024 that Rumble has set a new record for its peak viewership. Its previous best also came during a political moment: The September debate between Trump and Kamala Harris, which drew more than one million viewers to Rumble at its peak.
Subscribe to get the latest creator news
The platform’s new high-water mark is greater than the equivalent number on Kick, which topped out at 1.75 million concurrents during the Stream Fighters 3 event in October. Among the top streaming hubs, only YouTube (16.02 million concurrents) and Twitch (6.74 million) have attained higher peak viewership than Rumble.
On Election Day, the most-watched streamers on Rumble were conservative pundits Dan Bongino (with 515,000 concurrent viewers) and Stephen Crowder (460,000). Crowder was previously demonetized on YouTube for violating the platform’s election integrity policy.
Bongino and Crowder were not the only conservatives who ascended as part of the onrushing red wave. Trump consolidated his overwhelming advantage among young male voters by catering to right-leaning influencers and their fans on social media. That’s why UFC CEO Dana White gave a shout-out to Adin Ross and the Nelk boys as part of Trump’s victory celebration. The president-elect got face time with those creators before November, and it paid off.
dana white shouted out adin ross and the nelk boys on trumps presidential victory speech, we are so over as a nation
— hasanabi (@hasanthehun) November 6, 2024
The author of that tweet had a big night himself, even if his politics are on the opposite end of the spectrum from the likes of Crowder and Ross. Per Streams Charts, Hasan Piker‘s Twitch stream topped 300,000 concurrents on the night of the election. For progressives upset with the left’s poor results in the 2024 election, Piker’s warnings about the radicalization of young men now read as harbingers of the election that just occurred.
Meanwhile, on TikTok, creators turned electoral maps into games by letting viewers — not voters — choose the winner in each state. Those streams landed traffic from viewers searching for the real election maps while also providing a pick-me-up for disenchanted political junkies.
Between the fake maps, the prescient Twitch stars, and the phrase “thank you Adin Ross,” the 2024 presidential election showed observers that the tenor of political internet culture is shifting. By the time of the 2028 election, everything may move again. If current trends hold, Rumble’s platform-wide viewership record probably won’t last for long.
