Less than 10 years after its launch, this Canadian start-up claims some 80 million monthly active users (reference data for social networks), a traffic more than doubled (+142%) since the end of 2021.

Since its inception, the site has been an alternative to YouTube, a playground of freedom of expression, framed less strictly than its major competitors. Going public last September, Rumble is now valued at $2.8 billion on Wall Street.

In addition to its audience, unlike the social networks Gettr, Parler, Gab or Donald Trump's Truth Social, it attracts a significant number of advertisers and derives significant revenues from advertising (just under 40 million dollars last year), even if they are incomparable to those of YouTube (almost 30 billion).

Seduced, Donald Trump, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones or white supremacist Nick Fuentes have all created their channel, the last two being persona non grata on YouTube for years.

"It's really the only place where you can find authenticity, period. You won't find it anywhere else," founder Chris Pavlovski said at the Rumble earnings presentation on Thursday.

"Sounding board"

If it calls itself "neutral", the platform has become a hotbed of disinformation and conspiracy theories, especially on the coronavirus and the 2020 US presidential election.

Far-right conspiracy theorist Stew Peters' documentary "Died Suddenly", which made the link, empirically and without scientific data, between vaccination against Covid-19 and deaths of young people, has been viewed nearly 18 million times.

In September, after one of his videos was removed from authority by YouTube because it contained factual errors about the coronavirus, British comedian and actor Russell Brand moved, to a great media fanfare, to Rumble.

"They create a sounding board in which there is very little left-wing content," says Megan Squire, a researcher on extremism at the Southern Poverty Law Center, a human rights organization. "It really took a marked right-wing direction."

Video sharing platform Rumble all itself as the YouTube for conservatives even as it faces criticism for allowing widespread misinformation and conspiracy theories © Chris Delmas / AFP

Media analysis site NewsGuard found last year that nearly half of the platform's results on queries related to November's U.S. legislative election were from unreliable sources.

Rumble claims to practice content moderation and exclude those that contain obscenities, or whose authors engage in harassment or "doxxing", that is to say the posting of personal data and information in open access without the consent of the individuals concerned.

While Rumble will probably never reach, even remotely, the influence of YouTube, it still has a major reach, because it offers "a universe of news completely different" from the most frequented video and social media platforms, according to Samuel Woolley, a professor at the University of Texas.

"It upsets the understanding of news and information," the academic describes, creating "a space in which empirical truth can be challenged without being clearly refuted."

© 2023 AFP