Rumble

Rumble describes itself in its own terms as a user-generated video content agency that provides a video exchange, a hosting platform and a player, and the first of those nouns is the one that matters: what it offers a creator is representation, not just hosting. Its pitch, in its app store copy, is freedom-first and uncensored, and the categories it puts in front run from news, politics and podcasts through gaming, finance, sports, music and cooking. The audience figure it publishes is old enough that it prints the date beside it — more than 70 million monthly active users as of 2022. It ships three apps rather than one, a viewer app, a streaming studio and a crypto wallet, which says something about where the company expects the money to come from.

You watch on the site or in the app, follow a channel to be told when it goes live, and see a viewer count and a live chat beside a stream. Broadcasting can be done straight from the website or through the studio, and the studio is the part worth understanding: it will push a single stream to Rumble, Locals, YouTube, Twitch and Facebook at once, gather the chat from all of them into one window, and put as many as nine people on screen together. It works with the ordinary streaming software, so a creator arrives with the setup they already have. Moderation of the chat is the creator's job rather than the platform's — deleting messages, muting people for the rest of a stream or permanently, blocking words and links, appointing moderators — and live streams are recorded and left available to watch afterwards unless the creator switches the replay off when setting up. The company's own help page warns people not to test things on a main stream, because the recording stays.

Watching and uploading are both free, and the money is made on two sides that barely touch. A viewer can pay 9.99 dollars a month, or 99 for a year, for a subscription that removes programmatic advertising and adds downloads, a badge and the ability to schedule further ahead, though the terms are candid that host-read sponsorships and native placements remain, so ad-free has a limit. On the creator's side the arrangement is the most unusual in this batch and the terms state it without decoration: uploading appoints Rumble as an exclusive, worldwide agent for a term of 50 years, renewed automatically for another 50, with fees of 40 percent on advertising, sponsorship and licensing and 20 percent on tips and pay-per-view. A comparison page puts the creator's share at 60 percent on Rumble and 90 percent on YouTube revenue, with the qualification that earnings are calculated after processing fees, hosting costs, taxes and other deductions. Two of the four licensing options make a video impossible to delete, and submitting content grants the right to use it to train AI models. Viewers can also pay creators directly, and there the split is the opposite: the company says a 5-dollar monthly channel subscription is kept by the creator in full, while its own subscription generates no creator earnings at all.

The age rule is unambiguous in both the terms and the privacy policy — nobody under 18 may use the site — and the stores rate the apps for adults. Content rules sit inside the terms rather than on a guidelines page, prohibiting pornography, incitement, hatred, doxxing and the exploitation of children, alongside a clause reserving the right to remove anything that Rumble decides, in its sole, unfettered and arbitrary discretion, is undesirable. How that discretion is used is stated honestly: material may be reviewed before publication but need not be, the company accepts no obligation to keep or explain anything, and it says outright that it has no responsibility to tell a complainant the status or outcome of an investigation. No appeal process is published for a removed video or a suspended account. Reporting runs by email with the word complaint in the subject line, copyright claims go to a named agent in Toronto, and a report of non-consensual intimate imagery, including a digital forgery, is promised removal within 48 hours. Two absences stand out. No retention period is published for recordings or for personal data. And the developer's own declaration on Google Play states that data is not encrypted, which is the kind of fact most platforms in this directory leave unsaid.

Creators who want to publish once and appear in several places at once, and who will accept the representation terms to get it: the studio is built for exactly that, and the fees are published plainly enough to plan against even though the payouts are slow. Viewers who want live news, politics and podcasts beside long-form video and a short-form feed, and who are willing to pay to remove programmatic advertising. The programme that pays creators for driving subscriptions asks for a serious volume of streaming and watch time each month and is open in only 7 countries, so a casual streamer is not who it is looking for.

The most consequential contract in this batch and the one a creator should read before uploading anything. The agency arrangement is not buried: a 50-year exclusive term that renews itself, a 40 percent fee on most of the money the content earns, two licences under which a video cannot be deleted, and a grant to train AI models on the work. The 60 percent headline is struck before hosting, taxes and processing costs, and the platform keeps the two sides of its business carefully apart, since a subscription bought for a creator is passed on in full while a subscription bought from Rumble earns creators nothing. The moderation posture is unusually frank — review is possible but not promised, removal is discretionary, and the outcome of a complaint need not be explained to the person who made it — and no appeal exists to test it. Read together with the admission that data is not encrypted, this is a platform that tells you what it is, which is worth more than the slogans on either side of it.