Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining for a fireside chat with Rumble. I'm Jason Helfstein, Head of Internet Research. I'm very excited to have Chris Pavlovski, the company CEO, and Brandon Alexandrov, the company CFO. We're gonna do a fireside chat format. If you have any questions, and some of you have already submitted, please use the chat box below the stream window, and then I will get to those. So gentlemen, thanks for joining us, and right after last night's earnings. So we will get to earnings, but just let's start, as some folks may not be familiar with the story, can you give us an overview of the company and its broad mission?
Thanks, Jason. Glad to be here. I have Brandon Alexandrov, our CFO, as well. So Rumble started in 2013. It started on the premise of helping the small creators get distribution and monetization tools that they weren't getting on all the incumbent platforms, in particular, YouTube. By 2020, we had Congressman Devin Nunes reach out to us in the summer of 2020 to bring his podcast onto the platform because he was getting censored on the platform in some way, shape, or form. And when he came to our platform, he accumulated around 200,000-300,000 subscribers in 2-3 months, whereas on YouTube for 4 years, since 2016, he only accumulated roughly 10,000. So you can call that censorship, shadow banning, whatever you like.
From there, the majority of the conservative political world ended up coming to Rumble. By mid-2021, we received our first round of financing. By 2022, we ended up going public on the Nasdaq under ticker RUM, and now we're here today. I would say today, the mission of the company is very clear. We're here to protect the free and open internet, both on cloud and video, and I believe we're at the tip of the spear when it comes to protecting free speech and the First Amendment and Article 19 of the United Nations Human Rights Declaration of Human Rights. We're at the tip of the spear of that, and very proud about that.
That's kinda a nutshell Rumble and kinda the genesis of what we've gone through over the last decade.
So we'll get to the two different sides of the business, and actually there's even more than that with some expansion of the products. But starting with content and advertising, so obviously start with engagement. Maybe describe the mix of content on Rumble, like, how would you broadly characterize it? Between political, not political, you know, if you wanna segment the views within, just broadly, how do you characterize the content on Rumble?
Yeah, that's changed quite a bit. In early 2013 to about 2020, it's cute cats and dogs, funny stuff. And then it became quite political from 2020 to about late 2021, and then by 2022, something happened where we started to see a lot of content in the crypto and finance world start coming in. We started to see a lot of the younger influencers start coming into the platform, and it kinda really changed the dynamics of the platform. And then since we've been public, we've really kinda stepped on the gas pedal and spent a lot of money in diversifying that. That was kinda the promise that we made when we went public, is that we're gonna be more than just politics, and I think we've executed quite well on that.
We've brought in exclusive sports leagues, like Nitro Rallycross racing. We've brought in the premier skateboarding league, SLS, which does great numbers. We have Power Slap. We have the UFC. We even brought in Barstool Sports, and we've brought in a lot of different influencers in different spheres. So, in terms of the content, the genesis of content has changed quite a bit. One of the things that we haven't done well is that we never really focused on algorithms and AI for the first few years, just because of the hesitancy of our user base not liking the idea of any type of bias.
But what we've done is we've changed that in 2024, because we found that it's really important to surface a lot of this, like, non-political content to users that wanna consume it. So we started investing heavily into AI and recommendation algorithms earlier this year, and we rolled out our first iteration of that about a month ago. And we're gonna be continuing to learn and roll out further iterations of that, and we're seeing quite good results with that in the early going, and the early going is usually not that great. So we're seeing some pretty big results on that side, so we're pretty excited about that. And this will help surface and make Rumble appear, you know, more customized to every user.
Right now, it's just our team putting in content that we think a lot of people are clicking on. But really, if someone has no interest in politics, why go to Rumble and get politics? You should be able to get Barstool, or you should be able to get UFC if you're interested in that, and you should that should be surfaced to you right away. So that's been one of our big things that we've been working on here in the last six months.
And so the way you've been, again, kinda getting what we'll call basically more premium content, is through basically paid minimum kind of rev share. I mean, the model is a revenue share, similar to the way you do it, YouTube is, but because, you know, the revenue today is not at scale yet, you've used minimum guarantees. You've kind of talked about, and you updated us last night on kind of where we are with that. You know, we're still seeing that as a drag. So maybe Brandon, just talk about kind of the, you know, how minimum guarantees are playing into kind of the gross margins and how that runs off.
And I think you gave an example last night of a content creator who's basically deals expired, and you chose, you know, basically not to renew the minimum guarantee. But because the content creator was getting enough distribution and, you know, enough some form of revenue, they basically stayed without the minimum guarantees on the platform.
Yeah, so as, as Chris mentioned, one of our promises when we went public a couple years ago was diversify the content by bringing on some of these creators outside of politics, for example, exclusively. And so we, we did incur large expenses over the last couple years associated with that. But we disclosed in our financials, Jason, as Jason mentioned, what our commitments are that are left. And at the moment, it's $55 million of creator commitments left, which all should fall off within the next year to year and a half. And so right now, you'll probably see that the gross margin in the financials are negative, because a majority of those minimum guarantee costs are flowing through cost of services.
However, as we move towards the end of 2024 and into 2025, those, those should fall off, and as a result, you know, we turn gross margin positive, and then ultimately adjusted EBITDA, moving materially towards adjusted EBITDA breakeven by the end of 2025. And so we will look a s those expire; w e'll look at every single one of them. If there's an opportunity to extend them in order to continue to have ROI profitability, we would maybe consider it. But the general consensus is that we're hoping by the time that they expire, there'll be sufficient advertising revenue that the creator can earn from the 60% that we paid, that Jason mentioned, to that, to that creator, so that they stick around. They also have a large audience on Rumble.
They're gonna. We're hoping that they'll stick around as well as these MGs start falling off.
Yeah, and I'll just add, like, that example I gave last night, which was, Akademiks. He's on Twitch, and he's on YouTube, and he's on Rumble. Prior to us diversifying, he was never on Rumble. And now, after we did an agreement with him, not only is he still on Rumble, but Rumble is actually, you know, doing about four to five times better than Twitch is for him, in terms of live viewers. So, that, that's what I just saw just a couple days ago. So it shows that it's kinda gotten sticky with the audience. The audience stayed. Not only did Akademiks stay, but his audience stayed watching on Rumble, which is a big win.
And when we first got all these creators, obviously we had this perception that Rumble was only politics, so we might have, you know, we had to pay a little bit of a premium to get these guys in the early goings, but that doesn't exist anymore. These most of these creators don't see us as that, and we have a different perception now in the younger demographic, where, you know, if we did want it to renew, it's our goal right now not to, because we want these guys to be sustainable without renewing any type of contracts, and just working on the current rev share agreements that the platform gives, and the tools that the platform gives. And that's kinda where we wanna take everything.
And so far it's, we're seeing some very positive success on that. And it's nice to see, because those premiums that we paid are really dropping off and, you know, lowering our cash burn quite a bit as they drop off.
And so last night you reported 53 million global MAUs, 37 million in the U.S. That U.S. number was up 32% year-over-year, 6% sequentially. That number comes from Google Analytics, just for the folks who don't know. Just maybe you're changing around the metrics or kind of trying to, we'll just call it, kinda consolidate and kinda clean up the metrics, so you're no longer gonna give out hours, which wasn't necessarily a clean metric because it was a calculated. It was an implied metric, not an absolute metric, and you're not gonna give kinda uploaded hours anymore, and the focus is just gonna be on kinda MAUs. So maybe just either Chris or Brandon just talk around the logic behind that.
Yeah. The way we're looking at this business right now is on a ARPU basis. We wanna see how we can monetize our creators. The entire management focus for the last few years has been, you know, product, how well the product is working, and that has shifted a lot in the last six months to a year for us. When we turned the year earlier this year into 2024, the shift, like, for our management team, was entirely, it's entirely on revenue now. So we're looking at everything on how we can monetize creators, and how we can drive revenue and profits to this business. That's a totally new mentality and shift from, you know, raising money and building the product.
Because we needed to get the product up to standard and up to a comparable, get it comparable to YouTube in some capacity. And now that we're, like, you know, comparable in, in a lot of ways and better in a lot of ways, worse than others, now it's really our time to focus on getting those revenue engines going, bringing in advertisers, bringing in tools to monetize creators. Because that is the holy grail when it comes to a video platform, is like, we need to be better at monetizing those creators than our competition, and that's what we're entirely focusing on. So we're focusing on programmatic, we're focusing on creator sponsorships, which YouTube doesn't have. That's a huge competitive edge for us. And then we're focusing on subscriptions.
So the combination of those three, I think is a tool set that beats the competition. They don't have that with the competition. They don't have all three in the way that we do. So I see that as a competitive edge, and we need to really drive that home and work on that, and that's why we moved to ARPU. ARPU is the number we're looking at closely, because we need to see how we're doing on monetizing the users. And we wanna take that from $0.30 to $5-$10. We wanna really move that. And you can kinda see how far behind we are compared to the competition right now, so there's a lot of upside for us.
Let's talk about the Rumble Advertising Center, or referred to as RAC. Basically, this is a programmatic self-service tool that basically would allow an advertiser to basically kind of go on and manage their own campaign. This is still very new, really kind of got out of beta the very end of last year and kind of you went live early. So just talk about your learning so far with RAC, kind of what you have left to do, and to the extent that the issues around GARM and some of the industry efforts to categorize conservative-leaning content and kind of perhaps what effect that's had on certain programmatic ad channels?
Yeah, I think one of the amazing things about Rumble is in light of what we've learned with GARM and the House Judiciary Committee emails that they released and how the boycotts are happening around Rumble and X, despite that headwind, we were able to still grow from quarter one to quarter two our revenue. And that means we're growing it because of performance-based advertisers, not because we're having big buys come in by a big brand to get, you know, brand awareness. That's not happening. We're doing it because the advertisers that are advertising on our platform are actually able to sell a product and make an ROI on it, and that speaks volumes. That speaks volumes to the audience that we have on Rumble, how valuable it is, and how good it is.
So I think what's happening out there in the ecosystem is not sustainable. I don't think these brands can continue to block platforms like Rumble and X and not tap into that inventory. It's a disservice to their shareholders, b ecause when you cut off an entire part of the internet and not access it, it raises prices on the other side. So they're paying a premium and they're missing out on a really, really good audience that performs extremely well. Just based on our data alone, we've proven that. So I don't think that's sustainable for the long term, and obviously with GARM and WFA creating this boycott and controlling 90% of ad budgets, that's also illegal.
So they disbanded GARM, two days after we filed our lawsuit, which is a really good indication for us. I think that that kind of speaks volumes. There's, there's a there there. I think the advertisers are freaking out about that, so they're gonna need to shift, and I think that shift will come. I don't know when, but I definitely think it'll come. It's not sustainable to boycott things like Rumble and X. And even if they do, we're still able to grow with performance-based advertisers, and one of the things we need to do with RAC is we gotta get smarter for these performance-based advertisers.
So they're winning, buying in a self-serve system on Rumble with no real smart technology like Google or Facebook has in terms of putting the ad in front of the right person. They can target by geo, they can target by a few different things, but they can't get— they're not getting that smart targeting that you're getting on Facebook and Google. So there's a lot of room for us there to make that even better and more comparable to Google Ads. So as that gets better, you know, the buying gets better on Rumble, the performance-based advertisers will grow.
So we see a lot of opportunity, even with performance-based advertisers, but if we can open up the door with the 90% of the advertising agencies that are part of the WFA and GARM, I think that has a material effect overnight on Rumble. Like, if they just come in and start bidding in RAC, it's like, it's gonna have a material effect, and it would send ARPUs, in my opinion, high very fast. And that changes the game.
So one of the things I think of investors, they look at kind of the financials. Your ARPU in the second quarter of last year was, like, the highest it's ever been, and it's kind of even now is, like, below that there. And so maybe let's just kind of review the one-time factors that kind of drove up that second quarter 2023 ARPU, because I think it was, again, if people are trying to be trending, it was, it was one time in nature.
Yeah, correct. So because we're doing performance-based ads, sometimes we take rev share deals. We're trying to get away from that because it's very volatile to do a rev share deal. And sometimes in a quarter you can have, like, huge overperformance for a certain client or a new client that comes in that does really well. So the performance-based ads create a little bit more volatility and can, you know, you can have a really big quarter because of the performance if it does really well on a specific advertiser. So that creates the volatility.
But, as we, you know, get better with RAC and we automate this, I think that volatility gets less and less as we, as we grow, and we've kind of started to notice that that volatility is becoming less and less. And, you know, obviously, when the brands step in, that'll create volatility to the upside. But, I also think that, over time, that starts to smoothen out as well.
So let's talk about some of the other revenue streams. So, within ad, before we get to cloud, within advertising, there's also, basically products, you know, the company is either partnered with. So, Rumble launched its own coffee brand, 1775 Coffee, and then, Well, that was a partnership, 1775 was a partnership, right? And then there's Rumble-branded products as well around, around pet, around, cellular service, et cetera. So just talk about some of those initiatives, like, outside of the advertising initiative.
Yeah, so what we've done is we've created our own branded product lines to fill inventory that we're unable to sell, and we've seen tremendous success on that. I think in July, we announced that the sales run rate is over $1 million for the coffee already. It just kind of shows how valuable our audience is. We're able to sell coffee, we're able to sell pet food, we're able to sell anything we wanna sell to our audience because we have real users that have pockets with and wallets that can spend. So what we've done is, because there's obviously a boycott happening and big brands might not wanna advertise on Rumble, we've released an email, like Dunkin' Donuts, for example, didn't wanna touch Rumble because of the perceived right wing.
We created our own coffee brand, and we're able to drive sales for that and drive revenue, which helps monetize the creators and helps bring profits to Rumble. So, in the short term here, and in the meantime, we're if an advertiser doesn't wanna step up to the plate, we've found a partner that's willing to create the product so that we can advertise it and generate revenue on it and fill the inventory. And, we see that as a real— here's a really big potential, and you're probably seeing in the market now, there's a lot of influencer brands like Prime and all these things that are doing quite well.
Rumble has that ability to create these large brands pretty quickly because of the open inventory that we do have and because the audience that we do have. So if someone's not gonna advertise their product, we'll, or in a certain vertical, we'll bring that to the table in a very easy, quick way through our partner. It doesn't require any lift on our side. There's no cost on our side. We have a really good partner that will do it for us, and so we're just gonna scale that out and be able to monetize Rumble and creators if a brand won't step up.
And just, Brandon, my understanding is that revenue is booked on a net basis. So just can you help us understand, like, what kind of gross margin that or, like, how that flows through basically, so that, you know, obviously, you know, you're getting—obviously, there's sales of that, but you're booking a relatively small percent of the actual sales of the product as you are on a net basis?
Yeah, at the moment, it's being booked on a net basis based on the share that we take from our partnership arrangement with the product there. So it's still, from a revenue perspective, it's still small. Opportunity to grow on that quite materially over time.
Got it. Okay, so let's talk about cloud. So you've basically built your own CDN and cloud so that there was no risk of, you know, a one of the large hyperscalers turning Rumble off if they disagreed with any of the content. You then now made that service available to outside providers, similar as what the other hyperscalers have done as they've launched clouds. You know, you announced last night that you were partnering with the Miami Dolphins, were gonna use your cloud.
Just talk about why a customer would use the Rumble Cloud as opposed to, you know, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and then ultimately, as you look to scale this business, you know, how do you manage the cost so it's not a margin drag, again, as you know, the primary focus of the business is content and advertising?
Yeah, that's a good, good question. So when it comes to the cloud, because we're a video platform and the vehicle for- that we host on, we host is video, we have enormous upside capacity. We have to have high peak capacity for very big moments, like the debates, and et cetera. We also have to have enormous amount of storage, enormous amount of throughput, an enormous amount of compute power because of all the live streaming. So we have such high capacity and unused capacity all the time. It was... The way we looked at it is, why not sell it? So it's not a burden on cost for us, going forward. The burden has already happened because we had to build it for Rumble, the major burden.
So right now, we just have a ton of capacity that we could go sell to the market, and that's what we're doing. I think this is the same reason why Amazon bought Twitch, and also a really big reason why Google Cloud can do so well is because they have YouTube, and Microsoft has Xbox and Windows Update that drive their capacity and throughput. We're in a situation where when you do so much throughput, you can peer to all the partners for essentially for free, and then you can charge that to you can charge that if you have customers on it.
So with Rumble and Rumble Cloud, initially, the idea was, is that there's a huge parallel economy that we can go and service, businesses that are aligned with our, with Rumble, and we were able to get customers on that basis, Trump Media & Technology Group, PublicSquare, alongside many, many, many others. But what we've realized as we've hit the market is that there's an oligopoly with Amazon, Microsoft and Google that are controlling pricing on these companies. And a lot of these large companies are actually expressing to us that they're having a real tough time scaling with these guys because of the pricing, and there's all these crazy costs coming in, and it's getting very, very expensive.
Whereas cloud was always we all thought cloud was gonna save people a lot of money, not, not increase costs. So now there's a real concern in the market right now with pricing by these three big cloud companies. So what we've done is we started approaching these companies that are concerned about cost, and we think there's an opportunity there for us. We've also announced yesterday that the Miami Dolphins are gonna start using our cloud. This is a perfect example that, you know, we're not just winning customers based on the idea of a parallel economy, but we're winning customers based on economics and the tools that we can provide.
I think that's a really good case study for us in terms of, you know, how big this market can be for Rumble and how we can compete with these other guys. I think people are not fully appreciating how expensive the big three cloud companies are and how it doesn't need to be that expensive. And there's that creates an incredibly large opportunity for Rumble. So I would say the opportunity on our cloud side is to sell this excess capacity we already have, so there's no burden of cost for us in any material way.
Then there's the parallel economy opportunity, and there is, which is now, I've, I've been very quickly to identify there's a cost opportunity here, where we can really win on the cost side for a lot of these customers.
So basically the reason why Miami Dolphins is basically signing this deal is cost. They, that what you presented them is more cost efficient than alternative options?
Yeah, no, I would say that's more for a lot of the larger customers that we've been talking to. The Miami Dolphins is more just an economics and tools, and we were able to sell them on that. I don't know the exact reason why, but I know that, generally speaking, they like the idea of Rumble Cloud. They like the offering they've had. They've tested it, they liked it, it worked well. Just based on—i t could be a combination of cost, the tools, the availability, et cetera.
So I'm just generally giving the feedback that I've been seeing in the market, is that a lot of it has to do with costs running away for a lot of these customers. And I think—
And then when you add a new customer, I think you talked about talking to some governments, potentially some European governments, et cetera. Like, what's the cost to bring that up? Do they 100% bear the cost, or is there any cost by you to spin up a new customer?
So it all depends on the needs of the customer. So, for example, we have enough excess capacity to throw them on what we have right now for what they need without, you know, investing much into it, if any at all. Now, do certain governments require, you know, for security reasons, to be facilitated in their region? You know, there might be costs like that, depending on the government and their requirements and their security requirements, et cetera. So everything's kinda really custom, but generally speaking, Rumble has such large capacity, we can bring on a government tomorrow if the government would be okay with, you know, being in the United States overnight.
Now, if they require us to step into their country and have a point of presence there, that's not a very big lift for us, because, you know, we have more than 14 points of presence across America, and we are actually, for Rumble, we do need points of presence in Europe and in Asia, et cetera. So that's something we need to invest in regardless. So if we're gonna invest into it, might as well invest into it in a place where we're gonna make some revenue, too. So that's the way we look at it.
There was a question online just about Truth Social. There was basically saying how Truth Social has put out some press releases about their new CDN. Do you, like, look at them as competition for cloud customers?
No. Their CDN, I think, is very particular to this acquisition that they made for their TV product that they're working on. It's a very specific thing. They're still using all our services and growing with us, actually, on the broad side of our services on cloud. So that's actually a partnership that's been expanding.
So let's jump over to political. So, you know, historically, when you've gone through presidential or midterm years, you've had a pickup in engagement. Kind of how are you thinking about the potential for a pickup in engagement in the back half of the year? And then ultimately, do you think that's monetizable engagement, either from you know, advertising or broader abroad, you know, any kind of advertising, including political advertising?
Yeah, so I don't think we're gonna have the same problem we had with GARM with political advertising. So I think, like, you know, get out the vote, and as we enter into September and October, I you know, we're all expecting political dollars to follow with that. So we're excited about that. And as I mentioned on the earnings call, we've— ou know, Streams Charts is an example of something that's been watching our average live viewers, and they noticed, like, a 34% uptick in July alone. And you know, on our side, we saw engagement really do very well in July as well.
So, with the debate that came a little earlier in late June and the GOP convention, I think things have kind of picked up a little earlier than we thought. We didn't anticipate a debate in June, in late June. So things—t he second half of 2024 is definitely looking to be, you know, very interesting and very exciting for us, a lot faster than we thought. And if the political dollars follow through as this audience follows through, I think that could be a really good storm for Rumble, and we're, you know, waiting anxiously for September to arrive to see what that looks like.
So just some questions around kinda like the marks of profitability. You know, we are seeing gross margins improve, right? You kinda peaked out at, like, negative 120% last year in the third quarter. This quarter was - 59%. In our model, we have basically a nice improvement in the gross margin loss, and then ultimately, gross margins going positive next year. And then, you know, EBITDA basically, you know, slight loss in 2026 in our model. But, I mean, Brandon, just, if you just wanna talk about, you know, we've pushed on you over the time we've known you to get more disclosure around the marks of profitability. Some of this is obviously you're reacting to things in real time.
You've given us some more disclosure about meaning, meaningfully toward profitability by the end of 2025. But just any other call you wanna share on just how you're thinking about the scaling of gross margins and moving to EBITDA?
No, you nailed it, Jason. So basically, yeah, we have been operating negative gross margin, but that's all been part of the plan. And then, as these creator agreements start falling off at the end of this year and into next year, that's when you turn towards gross margin positive. And then the next step is to get to adjusted EBITDA, you know, march towards adjusted EBITDA breakeven throughout the rest of 2025. We operate extremely lean, bootstrap company for the last, well, for the first 7 years of the business, and, you know, gonna continue with that mentality of operating leverage. And yeah, that, that's all part of the plan, over the next, you know, 4-6 quarters.
A nd so just if folks did kind of look through the numbers, again, you, you have run expenses pretty lean on a sequential basis, kind of very little inflation. That being said, on a reported basis, sales and marketing was up, about $3 million, but I think that was a non-cash kind of barter expense. So maybe just highlight the details around that arrangement, and because I don't think the barter revenue is there. So really it was kind of a one-time non-cash charge that actually got backed out of cash flow statement.
Yeah, that was testing a partnership with a media company where we incurred $3 million of expenses promoting Rumble on their radio and digital channels. And then we'll—t hey'll be spending the same amount on Rumble in the next, the second half of the year, and so that'll be captured in revenue in the back half of the year. But that's as you said, that's a non-cash barter expense, which is disclosed in the financial statements in the 10-Q.
Right. And so otherwise, sales and marketing was pretty flat. I mean, there was a little bit of expense creep in R&D, not much. And, again, a very small amount, like about $1 million sequential improvement in G&A. Just, I mean, talk about how much of that was kind of like normal versus maybe one-time expenses that you hit in the quarter.
Yeah. We built this business, you know, from the bottom up, unlike, you know, the way when Elon purchased Twitter and had 8,000 employees and had to reduce it down to 1,000. We started with 10 employees for the first 7 years of the business and kind of built our way up. We're very focused on controlling costs. You should see that kind of grow minimally, you know, not necessarily quarter after quarter, but if you kind of look at it on an annual basis over the next couple of years. Like, we have no intention of growing significantly. We've hired most of the employees that we believe we need in order to get through this phase of the business.
And so you may see some ups and downs on a quarter-to-quarter level, but generally speaking, you can kind of see the trend of where things are going, and we think we're operating quite lean.
One moment, w e’ll talk about Google for a minute. Just how should people, investors think about the long-term gross margin for the business and kind of what you inspire the long-term EBITDA margins?
Yeah, sure. So, I would say similarly with YouTube, we, we give, on the advertising side, we give a, 60% of the revenue that we generate to the creator. And so I think in the long run, once we get through this phase of, these minimum guarantees and negative gross margin, but in the long run, the gross margin should get to the 30%-40% range, because you got to give that 60% to the creator, and then there's a, a handful of small other things in there as well, like payment processor expenses and, some network and hosting expenses as well. So, you know, call it 30%-40% gross margin range.
And then, you know, long run EBITDA, not gonna necessarily comment on that now, but obviously, we're gonna continue to maintain super lean operating expenses. That is the culture of the business, and you know, we'll see in the long run where we get to on the EBITDA side. But that, you know, first step is to get to that gross margin stage, and then get to that profitability after that.
Got it. So let's talk a minute about Google. So, Google hasn't been, you know, a particularly helpful, I don't wanna call them partner, but a industry constituent for Rumble, i.e., about a year ago, they basically started to block content creators' ability to do auto-uploading of content to Rumble. So then those content creators had to manually upload their content. You subsequently sued Google. Not sure where we are in that lawsuit, but then obviously, we've all paid attention to Google now formally losing their antitrust lawsuit and being called a monopolist, and we don't nearly have enough time to talk about what the remedies might be like for Google, the industry, or the appeals process and all that.
Just with the five minutes we have left, just, you know, how do you think—what do you think the potential outcomes are with Google in, in A, you know, it's already run out of the numbers, but, you know, can you get automated downloads back? And then, B, to the extent, if Google ends up being, like, formally labeled a monopolist and loses their appeal, like, what impact would that have on your business long term?
Yeah, so there's two parts to this. The first lawsuit that we filed was in 2021, so it's been quite some time, and that was for search preferencing and the mobile apps. And they tried to dismiss that case, I think it was a couple of years ago, in 2022. Well, they tried to dismiss it right away. The judge denied all their requests, every single one of them. Then we went into full discovery with Google on search preferencing and mobile apps, antitrust case, and we're in deep, late discovery right now, in the expert discovery phase. So it's I think there's a trial date set for early 2025. So that's coming to it's coming to the very end of this phase.
And then the second case that we have against them, we filed another one earlier this year. Both cases are in the billions in damages for us, plus there's treble when there's antitrust, so you multiply that by three. We filed one against their advertising monopoly that they have. So there's two separate cases with Google that we have. And then what happened earlier last week with the DOJ and Google is a court ruled that they're a monopolist. So this bodes extremely well for us. It's a very very good thing for us.
We all knew they were a monopoly, but now a court has determined that they're a monopoly, and it was a very good opinion by the judge, very meticulous, very detailed, and very factual. So, you know, like I said, we all know they're a monopoly, and now a court has deemed that they're a monopoly. And our case is only built on this case. There's a lot of parallels, quite a bit of parallels, actually. And you know, we're looking forward to our day.
But, the remedies here mean everything, and because we're, like, at the late stage of all of this now, you know, we're not at the very beginning stages, but the late stages of everything, I think that the remedies will be really good, and hopefully they'll be very good. And they will have enormous impact for something like Rumble. If Google has to change their behavior, or if they're broken up. Let's say they're broken up, or let's say they have to change their behavior, this has a huge impact on Rumble, both on, you know, search results, both on competing. You know, the court ruled that they can't go and buy pre-installs on the Apple device.
That means they can't go buy the defaults on Roku as well. That means we can go and potentially do that, because we're not a monopoly. So this creates, like, massive opportunity for Rumble, and it allows for the market to compete fairly. So, I was extremely pleased with last week. It was a very important moment to see that, I think, internally and externally with our counsels, like, it was really good to see that. So, I think we're headed in the right direction. Rumble's on the right side of history here, and, you know, we've been patiently, you know, chipping away on this.
You know, we're getting to a point where everything's coming into reality here in a positive way.
Great. I think that's a perfect end note. Chris, Brandon, thanks for the time today, and anyone, if they have any other questions, feel free to email me, and we can connect you with management. Thank you.