RUM Group Inc.

Greetings and welcome to the Rumble Inc. first quarter 2024 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A brief question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Shannon Devine, Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin.

Thank you, operator. I'm here today with Chris Pawlowski, founder, chairman, and CEO of Rumble, Brandon Alexandroff, the CFO, and Tyler Hughes, the COO. A press release detailing our first quarter 2024 results was released today and available on the investor relations section of our company website. Before we begin the formal presentation, I would like to remind everyone that statements made on the call and webcasts, maintenance predictions, estimates, or other information are that might be considered forward-looking. All forward-looking statements are made only as of the date of this webcast and should be considered in conjunction with the cautionary statements in our earnings release and the factors included in our filings with the SEC. Future company updates will be available via press release and company updates via the company's identified social media channels. I will now turn the call over to Rumble's founder, chairman, and CEO, Chris Pawlowski.

Thank you, Shannon. Though it hasn't been long since our last update, I would like to reiterate the major achievements of our first quarter, led by the public launch of Rumble Cloud and Rumble Studio. While both products are still in their very early innings, we are highly encouraged by their market reception. For Rumble Cloud, we launched our initial cloud computing offering and successfully secured two key strategic partnerships. ACP Creative IT, and Kinshift to help augment and deliver our initial suite of products for the mid-market and enterprise segments. While we recognize that sales cycles can extend to several months due to the mission-critical nature of cloud services, we have seen great receptivity to our value proposition, which addresses some of the major pain points in the cloud market, including security and unpredictable costs. As a result, we have been able to successfully generate and advance many sales conversations with mid-market and enterprise customers. As we advance sales cycles, we will continue to augment our offering based on the feedback we receive from customers, which will extend our addressable market and accelerate our ability to capture a larger share. For Rumble Cloud, we expect to see meaningful results during the back half of 2024. Now turning to Rumble Studio, which has seen tremendous early results with over 2,000 creators adopting the product. These creators include Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Glenn Greenwald, Dave Rubin, and Donald Trump Jr., just to name a few. The Studio is the new cockpit for our creators where they can simplify their live streaming experience by easily streaming video to multiple platforms, inviting guests and engaging with their audiences. Most importantly, Rumble Studio will be a new scalable vehicle for creators to monetize their live content through our patent-pending technology to facilitate host-read advertising through the platform. While we continue to test the underlining technology and optimize the experience for both the creator and advertiser, we expect Rumble Studio to be a key enabler for us to automate and scale our host-read advertising revenue stream. One of the best ways we plan to drive host-read ads at volume is through Rumble-branded product lines. In Q1, we entered into a partnership to launch Rumble-branded 1775 coffee and have seen very promising results. March coffee sales by our partner were up 43% over February and April sales were up 68% over March. The strategy in entering partnerships to create products that fill excess advertising inventory is working so well that we have decided to launch multiple new products in the coming months. We believe the Rumble Studio technology can drive meaningful scale to this revenue line in the coming years with nearly zero investments. Both the studio and cloud round out the foundation of our portfolio, consisting of our flagship Rumble video platform, our new live streaming service, Rumble Studio, our advertising platform, Rumble Advertising Center, and of course, our new infrastructure as a service offering, Rumble Cloud. During the first quarter, Rumble Advertising Center, or RAC, began deploying pre-ruled video ads across our mobile apps. We also continued expanding our ad inventory by onboarding publishers to the RAC network, which is a massive long-term opportunity for us, as it was for Google with AdSense. We have seen great progress in growing the publisher network on RAC with the recent onboarding of Breitbart, the Gateway Pundit, Drudge Report, just to name a few. Outside of inventory expansion, we continue to build our sales and marketing teams as we drive demand to the platform, where we are seeing great results through direct response, particularly in the financial services, health products, and e-commerce. We are also making meaningful progress with brand advertisers. The first quarter reflected a transitionary period during which we completed the final leg of our core building phase, brought our monetization tools online, and began to ramp our focus on revenue as the quarter progressed. With this enhanced focus on revenue, we are on track to deliver sequential revenue increase starting in the second quarter. Given this transition and focus towards monetization, we plan on introducing Average Revenue Per User, or ARPU, as a key business metric later this year. Compared to our existing metrics of estimated minutes watched per month and hours of uploaded video per day, this new key business metric will better reflect our management's evolving assessment of the business and our priority to monetize our core user base. Our average MAUs for the first quarter were 50 million, representing our ninth consecutive quarter of over 40 million MAUs, further solidifying our core audience as we head into an exciting back half of the year with the U.S. election cycle. While we have historically had to spend money to incentivize certain prominent creators to join our platform to diversify our content and build out our user base, we believe this will become less and less necessary. This is because the new monetization assets built within our platform are designed to incentivize creators, driving organic growth through new content and will ultimately continue to add to our core user base. As a result, expenses from commitments to creators have started to reduce as agreements come to a close. We expect this trend to continue as we progress throughout the year into early 2025. As I close, I want to reiterate that we are now officially through our building phase as a company and have turned focus to executing and delivering top line growth. While growing sequentially quarter after quarter, we took our time, built the right products, and are now on track to deliver. Finally, I'd like to mention that we recently filed a second antitrust lawsuit against Google based on Google's monopolization of the online advertising market, with damages estimated in excess of $1 billion. This lawsuit is separate from our existing self-preferencing lawsuit against Google, where we have seen early success and are nearing the end of fact discovery. In addition to the billions in potential damages from both lawsuits, We're also seeking injunctive relief. If we are successful in these lawsuits, Rumble and other platforms can finally have a level playing field in search traffic, mobile apps, and online advertising, which we expect would lead to a material increase to our MAUs and advertising revenue. With that, I'll turn the call over to our CFO, Brandon Alexandrov.