管理層發言
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Rumble Inc. Second Quarter 2025 Earnings Call. Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Shannon Devine, Investor Relations for Rumble. Please go ahead.
Thank you, operator. I'm here today with Chris Pavlovski, Founder, Chairman and CEO of Rumble; and Brandon Alexandroff, CFO. A press release detailing our second quarter 2025 results was released yesterday and is available in the Investor Relations section of our website. Before we begin the formal presentation, I would like to remind everyone that statements made on this call may include predictions, estimates, or other information that might be considered forward-looking. All forward-looking statements are made only as of the date of this call and should be considered in conjunction with the company's 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 the company's identified social media channels. I will now turn the call over to Rumble's Founder, Chairman and CEO, Chris Pavlovski.
Thanks, Shannon. Let's get right to it. Many of you yesterday saw the press release regarding our intent to acquire the AI company, Northern Data. I'm not going to be able to discuss that potential transaction during this briefing or answer any questions in the Q&A session. I will be limiting my remarks to the following. As noted on our last earnings call, our management team is very seriously focused on M&A strategy and evaluating strategic opportunities as they come. The announcement this morning is consistent with our ongoing pursuit of these opportunities. Northern Data is a leading provider of AI and high-performance computing solutions and operates primarily through Ardent, its data center business and Taiga, its GPU-as-a-Service business. Rumble has informed Northern Data that it is interested in pursuing a potential exchange offer in which the shareholders of Northern Data would receive newly issued Class A shares of Rumble common stock in exchange for their Northern Data shares.
Rumble has received positive feedback from Tether, the majority shareholder of Northern Data, regarding the potential offer on the preliminary terms described in the press release. It is important to note that Rumble has not made a final decision yet to launch the potential offer and still needs to complete additional work. The contemplated transaction, if pursued and completed, would be the latest step towards a shared vision between Tether and Rumble to democratize compute while providing unfettered access to infrastructure. This would be achieved by the delivery of GPU-as-a-Service and data center power, both of which would leverage Rumble's existing high-growth cloud business. Before we move on, please note that this offer is preliminary and subject to additional work, negotiation, and finalization of key terms. I encourage everyone to review our press release for further information, including certain risks, conditions, and uncertainties relating to the potential offer.
As you can imagine, the excitement internally at Rumble is hard to hold back. Rumble is embarking on new frontiers backed by what I believe to be one of the most innovative and forward-thinking companies in the world, Tether. This is driving a completely new mandate for Rumble. The second quarter was a foundational quarter for Rumble. From a user perspective, we held strong at 51 million MAUs, our eighth consecutive quarter above the 50 million mark. And when compared to Google Universal Analytics Q2 2023 number, which was post midterm elections, we are noticeably up. Most importantly, this was our first full quarter without America's and Rumble's largest live streamer, Dan Bongino. Dan's transition to the administration speaks to his leadership. And while we're incredibly proud and supportive of his journey, the real story is this, Rumble didn't miss a beat. That speaks volumes about the depth of our creator base and the stickiness of our platform.
From a monetization perspective, we delivered $25.1 million in revenue, up about 12% year-over-year and also up sequentially quarter-over-quarter, a result I'm incredibly proud of, especially as we lap the election year surge. On our previous calls, I discussed the shift in corporate America as a potential tailwind for our business, fueling our growth. Although we are still early, this critical transition is manifesting itself in unique ways. I previously mentioned some early progress with brands such as Chevron, which has committed to re-upping their campaign and America's largest injury firm, Morgan and Morgan, onboarded in Q2. This quarter, we saw a major theme: partnerships, just like the uphill battle of brands, and it has been very challenging to build our partnerships with other companies, which forced us to find growth in isolation. Now in this new environment, we are creating an ecosystem and making meaningful progress in building out partnerships that will lay a strong foundation for growth.
For the first time, I can say it feels like we have increasing momentum in this aspect of our business. Let me highlight a few wins. First, Cumulus Media. We've inked a strategic partnership spanning Cumulus Radio stations, Westwood One, and the Cumulus podcast network. This multi-pronged partnership allows our respective sales teams to work hand-in-hand unlocking new ad opportunities while bringing Cumulus premium content to Rumble. Second, we've signed a broad-ranging agreement with a leading AI player from an advertising partnership to a tech integration. This is not related to last night's announcement but continues to demonstrate how bold, ambitious, and committed we are on the AI front. We'll be providing more details later in the quarter, but this is the most we can say about that at this moment. Now Tether, no partnership has more overall impact right now. In the second quarter, Tether began advertising on Rumble and is helping accelerate our most exciting upcoming launch, the Rumble Wallet.
Launching in Q3, Rumble Wallet will be a noncustodial wallet used initially for tipping creators on the Rumble video platform with Bitcoin, Tether USDT, and Tether Gold. For those unfamiliar with noncustodial wallets, they allow you to directly own your cryptocurrencies and are not reliant on a centralized authority for access. This shared decentralized philosophy is a cornerstone of the Rumble Tether partnership. As we launch Rumble Wallet, we plan to activate the full Rumble community and also get very aggressive with onboarding new creators. We will do this by leveraging Rumble Studio to enable promotional Rumble Wallet ad reads at scale. Think about how everyone wins here. On one side, creators use Rumble Studio to multi-stream to all platforms, including Rumble. They then perform Rumble Wallet ad reads to generate revenue. On the flip side, on Rumble's side, more people are streaming to Rumble, more people are watching content on Rumble, and Rumble Wallet is being promoted and endorsed across the Internet.
As previously stated, Tether has already begun advertising in Q2 with Rumble. With Rumble Wallet, we anticipate that this will grow in future quarters. As you can imagine, we believe and anticipate Rumble Wallet will ignite growth for Rumble's video platform, both domestically and internationally. As part of this launch, in keeping with our theme of partnerships, I want to discuss MoonPay. MoonPay will power all crypto on and off ramps within Rumble Wallet, enabling seamless buy, sell, and swap functionality. MoonPay's creative agency, Other Life, will also leverage Rumble Cloud for next-gen object storage and decentralized compute. Bottom line, partnerships are no longer a someday goal. They're here, they're expanding, and they're creating a meaningful foundation for our next phase of growth. Finally, this leads me to Rumble Cloud and AI. This has obviously been a huge focus of ours. It is clear that AI is going to change the world.
If anyone is not aggressively getting into this space, they will become irrelevant very quickly. We have very ambitious plans around this space, particularly how it pertains to our cloud business, which I believe to be the most underappreciated part of our business today. To sum it up, our core business continues to demonstrate its stickiness despite coming off a monumental election year. We made significant strides with a diverse set of partnerships to set us up for future growth. We continue to expand our partnership with Tether, which is aligned with our long-term vision, and with Rumble Wallet launching soon, we're accelerating a new phase of growth. Since the transaction with Tether closed, our mandate has changed. YouTube has Google, CoreWeave has Microsoft, Anthropic has Amazon, and now Rumble has Tether. We've always been ambitious, but today we're in a new position. Our mandate is growth. Unlike big tech, it will be aggressive growth while also protecting a free and open Internet. With that, I'll turn it over to Brandon to walk through the financials.
Thanks, Chris. I'll now take you through our second quarter 2025 financials at a very high level before turning the call over to the operator for Q&A. We reported revenues of $25.1 million, a 12% increase year-over-year. This growth was primarily driven by a $1.7 million increase in audience monetization revenues and a $0.9 million increase in other initiatives. The increase in audience monetization revenue is due to an increase from Rumble Premium, local subscriptions, licensing, and shipping, offset by advertising revenue. Revenue from other initiatives grew $0.9 million, reflecting further traction in our Cloud business. ARPU increased to $0.42, up 24% sequentially, a positive indicator of our enhanced monetization strategy attributable to higher subscription and licensing revenue. Cost of services improved 26% year-over-year to $26.5 million, primarily from a $10.1 million reduction in programming and content expenses, partially offset by a $1 million increase in other costs, including publisher fees and payment processing.
The decrease is primarily due to the expiration of various programming and content agreements. Adjusted EBITDA loss improved to $20.5 million compared to a loss of $28.7 million last year, an $8.2 million improvement primarily related to the previously mentioned increase in revenue and expiration of programming and content agreements. We ended the quarter with total liquidity of $306.4 million, including $283.8 million in cash and cash equivalents and $22.6 million in Bitcoin holdings. Our Bitcoin holdings are carried at fair value and remeasured each quarter. Also, as it relates to cash, we used $17.5 million of cash and cash equivalents during the quarter. We have always been cautiously ambitious with capital deployment. As Chris mentioned, today we're in a different position. With the incredible backing from Tether and significant resources at our disposal, we believe we have the opportunity to evaluate investing in aggressive growth.
That concludes my prepared remarks. Before I turn the call over to the operator, I invite you all to join Chris this afternoon at 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time in an exclusive post-earnings interview with Matt Kohrs to be streamed live on the Matt Kohrs' Rumble channel.
分析師問答
We're now ready to open the line for questions.
I have a few questions, so I’ll ask them one at a time. You mentioned strong advertising growth in the second quarter. Can you provide an update on RAC? When can we expect to see an increase in advertising? Also, Chris, you didn’t discuss advertising much in your prepared remarks. Should investors assume that advertising will become less of a priority following the Northern Data announcement and your comments about Tether? That’s my first question, and I have two more follow-ups.
Jason, this is Chris. The answer to the latter part of your question is no. Advertising will still be a very high priority here. In fact, we're seeing a lot of signs that CPMs should start moving up as we go into future quarters and in future years. Specifically, to answer your question about RAC, one of the things that RAC was lacking prior to 2025 is that we didn't really have the ability to connect with the SSPs and bring our advertising inventory outside of our network and be able to monetize that well on their publishing sites as well. What we're seeing now in Q2, and most specifically in Q3, is that we're seeing a lot more publisher inventory come into RAC and we're also forming partnerships with SSPs like PubMatic, etc. So there's a lot of partnership activity happening right now in the background of RAC on both ends of the advertising and inventory side. So I actually see it as a very big potential growth opportunity in the coming quarters and years for us. And it's definitely something that is extremely high priority within the company.
Okay. And then just on your comment about creators, looking at onboard meaningfully more creators, I guess the question is, are you looking to find creators who are not monetizing on their existing platforms or that you plan to offer better monetization terms or both? Kind of how do you get them to join?
Yes. So there are multiple different avenues that we can use. Particularly, the main strategy will be Rumble Studio. We won't be asking creators to come exclusively. We'll be asking them to use Rumble Studio, where they can stream multi-stream across various platforms. The major benefit here is that they will get paid to start promoting the Rumble Wallet, which will give them a huge incentive to use Studio, and obviously, they're generating revenue. So we see that as a real opportunity to grow that creator portfolio in a very meaningful way. This being backed by Tether makes it much easier on our side to execute. We are currently scoping that out and looking at which creators we want to target, and we're hearing interest from those who are not on Rumble that they're very interested in joining and becoming part of this. The marketing initiative around this, both by Rumble and Tether to deploy the Rumble Wallet is what has everyone excited internally.
Okay. And last one, just, Brandon, on gross profit loss has improved meaningfully in the second quarter. Are we on track for positive gross profit in the second half? Can you talk about the path to positive EBITDA and free cash flow from here?
Yes, Jason. Yes, so with the financial resources that we now have in place, as well as our strong partnerships and resulting cash position, materially moving towards adjusted EBITDA breakeven is still important, but it has become a lesser relative priority as we evaluate investing into aggressive growth.
Okay. Any comments around gross profit margins for the rest of the year or just gross profit?
Not planning on giving guidance around that specifically. But yes, you clearly saw an improvement this quarter as some of the larger creator agreements started to expire. We are going to continue to evaluate our optionality going forward.
Your next question is from the line of Francesco Marmo from Maxim Group.
Congrats on the quarter. One, the question first on audience monetization and then one quick follow-up. So audience monetization, first part is MAU above what you were expecting to? I understand there's a lot of factors, political and nonpolitical, that impacted that and that cyclicality. But how is the evolution of MAUs coming through compared to your internal expectations? The second part of that question is on ARPU. That 14% growth in ARPU is quite impressive. I really appreciate the color around the growth in subscription. Could you guys provide some color on the initiatives that you are pursuing to get these results?
This is Chris. Regarding the MAUs, I was personally very impressed with the Q2 number, especially when compared to last year during an election year when politics and primaries were the central focus. We don't have that this year. More importantly, we lost our largest creator on the platform, Dan Bongino. Achieving 51 million MAUs, which is growth over the midterm post-election Q2 number in 2023, is a significant win for us, especially without Dan Bongino. On the ARPU side, one of the successful initiatives we've implemented since late last year is Rumble Premium, which you are starting to see take effect. We have begun to introduce mid-rolls and enhance audience monetization across the platform. As we started audience monetization through RAC, it also boosted Rumble Premium, creating a beneficial feedback loop between advertising and subscriptions. We are confident that as CPMs start to rise and advertiser demand increases entering Q4, we will see a positive impact.
Great. That was extremely clear. One quick follow-up on the Rumble Wallet marketing initiatives. I assume that most initiatives clearly will take place on the Rumble platform. Did you mention that you're going to collaborate with your own creators? Is that going to be the main marketing approach you have planned?
The marketing approach we have planned is definitely going to include creators on Rumble, and they'll be a significant part of it. But we're also looking to promote off Rumble on other platforms using Rumble Studio. We aim to use the Rumble Wallet in marketing and push the Rumble Wallet. Consequently, we will spend a lot outside of Rumble. Yes, Rumble creators will be key players in this endeavor and also a major revenue driver for us. However, we will tap into audiences we don't currently have, which is also very important. It's essential to note that Rumble Wallet isn't solely about growing itself; it’s also a mechanism we believe will drive growth towards rumble.com, as tipping will provide a unique offering. We will be the first platform of this size to enable BTC tips, USDT tips, and this will serve as an excellent advertising channel for creators on Rumble.
That's such a great answer. Like that's exactly the question I had in mind because ultimately, you're going to have that dual effect for the wallet itself, but then also a marketing opportunity for the platform itself. Is that the right way of thinking about it?
Yes, absolutely. It really should drive Rumble itself. One area where I think it will have the most influence is internationally. We currently have no international presence, but this will enable us to expand significantly abroad. I anticipate considerable international growth once we launch this, as this is something we've never focused on before. We have a sizable audience here in the United States but plan to enhance our presence outside with Rumble Wallet. This aligns back to rumble.com more than anything and is what excites us all. We expect MAU growth internationally and to see much more usage of Rumble across both international and domestic markets as Rumble Wallet will be the catalyst for that.
Your next question is from the line of Jason Helfstein from Oppenheimer.
I wanted to ask a follow-up, Chris. You mentioned that your current cloud business is somewhat undervalued and underrecognized. Can you provide an estimate of your cloud capacity today compared to Northern Data, not in revenue but perhaps in terms of technical capacity?
I'm not going to get into too much detail regarding Northern Data. However, I can say that with respect to the current Rumble Cloud, we're seeing quite a lot of interest from not just governments but also from large corporate entities. We've entered into RFP processes with multiple governments and corporate entities. We're now in peer groups with companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Rumble, and perhaps another player. We're beginning to see significant opportunities in these discussions. Just as we did with El Salvador, we’re starting to collaborate with them. This could snowball into something larger in the next year or two. As you know, these RFP processes take time, particularly with governments, but we are in the middle of many interesting RFPs.
There are no further questions at this time. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you very much for your participation. You may now disconnect.