Welcome everyone, to the Summer 2024 Investor Summit. We have here joining us today, Tyler Hughes, Chief Operating Officer from Rumble Inc, and we're thrilled to host them. We will hold a Q&A session towards the end of the webcast. You can ask a question at any point during the presentation. Your mics are muted, so it is necessary to type your questions into the Ask Question box on the left side of your screen for the team to address. Take it away, Tyler.
Great. Thank you very much for the introduction, and thank you for having us. On the call, I have with me Brandon Alexandroff, our Chief Financial Officer, and Steve Noonan, our VP of Corporate Development. We won't be walking through slides with you, today. We'll do it the old-fashioned way and talk through the growth story of Rumble, which is an exciting one, and I think I'll walk through the history of where Rumble has come from, and to where we are today. Today, we stand as a video and cloud services business. In the video space, we compete with the likes of YouTube, Twitch, Kick, and to some extent, X and Instagram, and so forth.
In the cloud services space, we participate in the Infrastructure-as-a-Service segment of that market and compete with the likes of AWS, Azure, GCP, DigitalOcean, and the list goes on in the cloud space as well. So video and cloud services space is where Rumble plays today. Our mission as a company is to protect a free and open Internet. As a company, we celebrate the values of free speech. We have an extremely passionate team that is grounded in the values of free speech. We always say, half-jokingly, that this is not a slogan that's slapped on our hallways in our offices. This is something that it runs through the DNA of the company. It is our secret sauce. It makes us go the extra mile.
It allows us to run lean as a company, that we take some pride in. So that's just a tidbit to start on the culture of Rumble and what we're about. But I'll spin back to 2013, which is the founding year. The company was founded in Toronto, Canada, by our CEO and founder, Chris Pavlovski, who at that time, in the video space, specifically in kinda online preferencing, if you look at that specific piece of it, was very simple. It was just big versus small. So at the time, YouTube was starting to preference large creators, multi-channel networks, big brands, and left the smaller creators by the wayside.
And Chris saw an opportunity to capture that market of small creators and provide them with the monetization and distribution tools they need to succeed and ultimately build their business. He often says, "Our aunts and uncles that are making videos." So that was really the premise and the founding principle of Rumble, and he launched Rumble in 2013. For the next 7 years or so, the company was bootstrapped. Again, if you think of the key tenets of the Rumble culture, one is our mission of protecting a free and open internet, and the second is a bootstrapped mentality. It runs throughout the DNA, and that comes with just being bootstrapped for that long. But as we fast forward to 2020, obviously, we remember those days.
The pandemic at the time was galvanizing the world, and the world of online preferencing started to get a little bit more complex. You started to hear the likes of the terms shadowbanning and cancel culture, and different things like that. And what was happening, there was a major fork in the road within the competition space, in the video space. And that was that Rumble didn't change our terms and conditions. That's the only thing we did at that time. We did not change our terms and conditions, and the incumbent platforms like YouTube started to play with their terms and conditions. And as a result of that, that gave rise to the things like I just mentioned, like shadowbanning and cancel culture.
There was a number of voices out there that felt like their voices were not being heard, and they found a new home on Rumble. Just to give you a sense of growth that we went through during that time period. We went from one million monthly active users to the order of 40 million monthly active users on the order of, you know, 18 months or so. Purely organic growth. Didn't spend a dime on marketing. These were new creators coming to Rumble, again, to get their voices heard. The primary major wave that came over was the conservative politicians, and podcasters, and news anchors that had come over. So Dan Bongino, Devin Nunes, Donald Trump started doing his rallies on Rumble, Ron DeSantis, and the list goes on.
So we went from a million, 40x growth, as I just mentioned, over that time period, and it’s just important. It sounds so simple that we didn’t change our terms and conditions, but it’s the trust factor that was lost in the creator economy, as, you know, YouTube had basically cornered the entire market, and those 40 million+ that have come over during that time and more and more since has given rise to Rumble. At the end of 2021, we raised our first outside capital through Peter Thiel and Narya Capital, and that was our first outside raise. Peter, at that time, was very interested in the infrastructure layer of Rumble. Rumble was never dependent on any of the hyperscalers like AWS, Azure or GCP.
Chris had always rented bare metal in terms of the infrastructure, and Peter, at that time, it was coming off of the heels of Parler actually getting canceled by AWS, which really sent a shockwave through the industry of having the fact that at the infrastructure layer, you could actually be turned off by a company like that. So it was an existential threat for Rumble to actually build its own infrastructure. And one of the initiation of that was really through Peter Thiel's initial investment, and I'll talk a little bit more about that when it's come to today.
But as we went forward and the years kind of went on through 2022, we started to see the shadow banning and this kind of free speech movement expand into other content verticals, whether it's pop culture. We had the likes of Russell Brand join the platform, basically unannounced. We had the crypto community come over to Rumble, and once we started seeing this expand and expand, we really saw this opportunity being more than what it is, and it wasn't just kind of a political thing. It became much more than that, and we decided to go public later that year. We went through a SPAC. We went and partnered with Cantor Fitzgerald as our sponsor, and we looked to raise $400 million.
At that time, for those of you that likely remember, at the end of 2022, redemptions weren't looking so great. I remember seeing market research reports of, you know, expect to get redemptions on the order of 80%-90% at that time, and as we went to de-SPAC, we saw 0.1% redemptions, meaning raised the full $400 million, which was an amazing achievement, obviously, for us, and it really speaks to the power of the retail following and investor base that we have with Rumble today, so really an exciting time for us as we entered 2023, and in 2023, we put that capital to work. We often coin it internally as our building year as a company. We had a couple main components of our investment thesis throughout 2023.
One was to grow and diversify our content library. In the end, we're here to protect a free and open internet. We're a neutral platform. We want everybody on Rumble, and that is truly our philosophy as we move forward. So we made significant investments into different content verticals. For example, we did a partnership with Dana White, with a number of his properties, with UFC, Power Slap, which was a new kind of influencer-led sport, which was very interesting to us as we reached into the younger demographic. Street League Skateboarding, very similar to Power Slap in terms of the audience and demographic that we were able to pull in. Nitro Rallycross was another one, and then most recently in early 2024, was a partnership with Barstool Sports and Dave Portnoy.
So really made a lot of headway as an example into the sports category. We made other investments into, you know, Gen Z creators, gaming, and also secured a lot of our news and politics as we headed into the general election this year and put ourselves in a great spot for that. So really checked the box in the first piece of our thesis to grow and diversify our content library in 2023. The second piece was our infrastructure, that I spoke to a little bit about Peter Thiel making his original investment, but obviously fueled with $400 million, we were able to put a piece of that towards our infrastructure. And by that, I mean it's the compute, the bandwidth, the networking that we need to support rumble.com and to power rumble.com.
Keep in mind, rumble.com today is 53 million monthly active users, roughly 10 billion minutes watched every month. This is a massive vehicle that pushes a ton of storage, encoding, all the compute resources needed to support that type of a platform. It's a very natural adjacency from a technology perspective, very similar to how it was for Google and YouTube. YouTube being the anchor tenant over there, AWS and Twitch. So there's a lot of different analogies out there competitively, where this makes a ton of sense. But in the end, this is a great anchor tenant for us, and we were able to build that infrastructure throughout 2023 and sell our excess capacity into the cloud market as infrastructure as a service, and that gave rise to Rumble Cloud as we know it today.
That's a little bit of a history about where the cloud came from originally. Grow and diversify our content, build out our infrastructure, and a third tenet of that investment thesis was to build out our product. rumble.com, for those of you that may know, in 2022, looked a lot different than it does today. For example, we didn't have a Roku app that long ago. Once we were capitalized, we were able to, you know, obviously staff up to really build out a modern video platform to support our user base. Now we would argue that we are near at parity with the YouTube UI/UX as you see it today. We've made major strides across that.
Rumble lives on every major platform, whether it be mobile apps or TV platforms as well. During that year, we nearly doubled our organization from 70 to roughly 158 or 160 employees at the end of 2023, which is still a small number. As I mentioned off the top, you know, the bootstrap mentality runs through our DNA. We're powered by our mission. We've done all of this with only less than 200 people. So it's something definitely as a notch on our belt, as we think of it, internally. During the time frame, just as I've walked up through the timeline here, we've made three key tuck-in acquisitions as well.
We acquired a platform called Locals in 2021, and this is now powering our subscription business under the Rumble umbrella, under the Rumble Video umbrella. We acquired David Sacks' company, who ended up joining the board through the transaction. His company was called Callin, and we made that acquisition in 2023. This has given rise to what we call Rumble Studio, which I'll explain in a second as well. And then finally, North River, which is an acquisition for our ad technology that's given rise to the Rumble advertising segment. 2023 was certainly our building year. The end result of our building has given rise to kind of four key products that we have today.
One is Rumble Video in the family of apps that hopefully most people know on the call today. And this is a free public platform akin to YouTube. It's integrated with Locals.com, which is a paywall and a subscription service. So if you wanna get your backstage pass to your favorite creator, you can pay $5-$7 a month on Locals and get access to their content. So Rumble and Locals kind of power that public and subscription-based service. We also do offer a premium service for Rumble now, which we launched this quarter, and that's a no-ad experience similar to YouTube Premium, for example. So that's our Rumble product. As I mentioned, we acquired a company called Callin, which has given rise to Rumble Studio.
Rumble Studio is a separate app for creators, which is basically the cockpit for live streaming creators. If you go into the app, you can go live, you can do split screen, you can invite friends, you can do all those bells and whistles that you need to with any other third-party app, like StreamYard, for example. The key to Rumble Studio, and we have patent- pending technology on this, is that it facilitates creator endorsements or host reads, we often call them, or even creator sponsorships. This is the idea of Dan Bongino doing a read for Athletic Greens, for example. Now, the key, the key thing to note about this is that when creator endorsements are done well, they're done authentically.
You see tremendous conversions, on this, and this is something we tested throughout 2023 in a manual sales process, meaning we had a small number of salespeople that were facilitating deals with creators and advertisers to find those perfect matches. And what we found is when they do, they really perform extremely well, much better, than a 30-second commercial or a pre-roll, for example. So as we tested that throughout 2023, and we saw the opportunity there, that's what gave rise to the Callin acquisition and developing, ultimately, Rumble Studio. And the goal of that product is obviously to drive live streaming, but on the monetization side, it's to scale host- read endorsements.
The experience for a creator with Rumble Studio is that when I'm going live, I'll have a number of options from advertisers that have put bids for campaigns for my show. And if I say: I wanna click this read for T-Mobile, and I'll get $50 if I do this read, I can do that on a click of a button on my live stream, and then I'll be presented with a script and some visual aids to execute that read on behalf of T-Mobile. So this is a way of really scaling that business, and we're really optimistic about that. We're really in the early innings of that. We have thousands of creators using Rumble Studio already today, and just starting to test the monetization features of that product.
The third product, so just to summarize, we have Rumble Video, we have Rumble Studio that facilitates a live stream and creator endorsements, and then we have RAC, which is an acronym for Rumble Advertising Center. This is a technology that, again, we built throughout 2023. It's an in-house ad platform, where an advertiser can sign up and get access to Rumble traffic. They can build a campaign, very similar, and it's built also like a Google AdSense. We can also take in other publishers, and we have already. We have Truth Social traffic on that, on RAC, excuse me. We have Breitbart, Drudge Report, and a number of others. So that's a lever we have to pull if we want to increase our inventory over time.
But right now, our focus as an organization is to monetize our Rumble traffic. Now, we're in the process of right now of building out our real-time bidding system that is the basis of RAC. If you were to look back at 2023, you would notice that we didn't even serve pre-rolls on our, on our apps, for example. Just in 2024 is when we started to release inventory and start to monetize it. So we went through a shift, from 2023, where it was really our building year to 2024, where we really are focused solely on revenue and really driving. With all of our monetization engines online now, 2024 is all about growing revenue, as a business, and particularly monetizing our 37 million North American users that we have on the platform, which are extremely valuable to us.
So that's a Rumble Advertising Center. Then finally, it's Cloud, which I've already mentioned. We built our own infrastructure as our anchor tenant, and now we're entering the cloud market, specifically the infrastructure as a service markets. We're offering virtual machine storage and the like, as we enter that market. We have a number of customers already on the platform, which is geared towards, you know, the mid-market enterprise sales category. We have Truth Social. We have an early adopter segment that is, you know, nicely aligned with our mission, like Truth Social, and PublicSquare, just as two examples. We most recently, on our last earnings call, announced our partnership with the Miami Dolphins, which is a great case of a company joining Rumble Cloud based on the economics that we provide.
Our go-to value proposition in this space is to provide price predictability to the cloud market that desperately needs it. For those that are familiar, you hear about egress fees and volatile pricing across the hyperscalers. We're really entering this market with the value proposition of bringing predictability with fixed monthly pricing, which is appealing nicely with that segment of the market. So just to summarize, where we are today, we have Rumble Cloud, Rumble Studios, our premier live streaming service that we really feel can transform the live streaming market through the monetization tools we've built into that.
We have our own ad platform, Rumble Advertising Center, that's built just like an AdSense, where we have Rumble traffic and other publishers that are available, and that's a lever that we can pull in the out years, as we build out demand on the advertiser side. We have Rumble Cloud, to wrap it up, the portfolio. We're in the early innings. We launched that product in March, this year. So we're in the early innings. There'll be longer sales cycles on the Rumble Cloud side, but already starting to see some wins, which is great for us.
The last thing I'll say, just to close off, is Rumble is obviously very well-positioned with our original phase of growth being in the conservative politics space, and certainly a piece of content that we still have lots of, I should say, as we head into this year. We have the U.S. general election coming, as we all know, at the end of this year, and we're very well-positioned to capture audience there. If you were to look at our one of our key KPIs, our monthly active users, you'll notice that in Q4, which by the way, has been over 40 million for about 10 consecutive quarters now.
But you'll notice in late, in late 2022, Q4, specifically 2022, with the U.S. midterm elections, we spiked up to 80 million monthly active users as a result of that election. We're just became one of the de facto places to come for that type of news and content, which is great news, but you'll see in the following quarter, we fell down to a roughly 50 million monthly active users. So we lost, you know, on the order of 30 million active users that came to visit the site. Now, it's important to remember that back in 2022, as I had mentioned, our UI/ UX experience was nowhere near parity to the likes of YouTube. This Q4, however, we're in a much better position. We've gone public since then. We've completely revamped our UI/ UX.
We're in a much better position from a content perspective to give more people more reasons to stay around, watch more content. We've improved the discovery on our platform to surface new creators. So as we head into this election, we do expect great engagement. We're off to a good start already in Q3 here, that we can capture a much higher percentage of those users that are no doubt gonna come to the platform in Q4 this year. Really excited about that. Obviously, extremely excited about the prospects of all of the new products we've brought online to the market. We're seeing great initial results. We're still in the early innings on a lot of them. But the whole focus of the organization as we move forward is to monetize that user base.
Those 40 million monthly active users that have been on our platform for the last 10 quarters, that's what we're excited about and focused on right now. Yeah, and couldn't be more excited about the company right now. But I'll pause there, and I think we may look at Q&A. But thanks for everybody's time.
So I guess we can jump into some Q&A here. We see some questions that have been asked. So, I guess I'll ask the questions, and then, this is Brandon, by the way, the CFO, Tyler or myself or Steve may, well, will answer these questions. So I'll start with question: How much cash does the company currently have, and do you have any plans to raise capital? So I'll actually answer that one. It's Brandon again. So we ended Q2 with $154 million in cash.
I'll add a couple pieces of context to this. So just first off, the big opportunity that we see here is the ability to monetize our user base. So as Tyler mentioned, we have 53 million monthly active users, of which 37 million are in Canada and the U.S. If we compare this opportunity to YouTube, they have $15 billion of annual revenue coming from 220 million users in the U.S. So that's $15 billion of revenue in the U.S. from 220 million monthly users. So that's approximately $15 of revenue per user per quarter.
We just recently announced that we added a new KPI to our financials showing what's called ARPU, or Average Revenue Per User, and we're currently at $0.37 per user per quarter, and that's because we are in the very, very, very early innings of monetization, as Tyler discussed, so there's a very large opportunity for us to monetize on our 37 million users in the U.S. and Canada, and that's where we see a really big medium- to long-term opportunity, so with respect to the amount of cash and whether we're planning on raising capital, just coming back to that, a couple things we expect to happen over the next 12- 18 months. Number one, those monetization engines will start kicking in, as Tyler mentioned, so we should start bringing in those programmatic advertisers and start generating ad revenue.
So while that's happening, at the same time, the creator commitments that we invested in to diversify our content as part of going public two years ago, those commitments will start falling off. So last year, at this time, we had over $150 million of creator commitments left to pay out to these creators, and, as of Q2, most recently, that we announced, that number is down to $55 million. So those commitments are gonna start decreasing, meaning we expect our cash burn to decrease quite significantly, and as we've communicated publicly, we expect to move materially towards adjusted EBITDA breakeven in 2025 as a result of that. And, our current business model, based on our current business model, we do not expect that we will need to raise additional capital.
So that is that question. I'll ask the next question here: You mentioned 53 million monthly active users. Is this the best KPI for the company? If not, what KPIs should I be tracking? Tyler, do you wanna talk to MAUs and the fact that we added ARPU as well, that those are kind of our two most important KPIs?
Yeah, I think, I mean, it's most important to realize that, yeah, obviously, we've reflected our focus with introducing ARPU into our KPIs as a company. Our sole focus as an organization is to monetize our user base, specifically within North America. That's the current value in the company that we feel is the biggest opportunity, and that continues to be our focus, primarily through advertising and cloud. So that's really the focus of the organization, and we feel, obviously, that MAUs and ARPU are the best reflecting that.
On the Cloud, is the focus today solely on attracting and onboarding enterprises? Tyler, do you wanna take that one?
Yeah. With the Cloud, as I mentioned, it was existential for us to enter at least supporting rumble.com with the infrastructure, and then we had the opportunity to enter the cloud space and sell off our excess capacity. Our original product that we have launched is suited for enterprise right now. We will look into other segments of the market by launching. For example, just to clarify, we've launched with dedicated resources into the market, which is a higher price point and more suited for the mid-market to enterprise segment. We are looking into potentially offering shared resources into the market, which would open up new segments of the market into kind of the developer and small, medium-sized business space.
But right now, our focus is to land these customers, and we feel we've made some great strides already and advanced a lot of sales conversations, and you can see that we've closed a couple already with PublicSquare, Truth Social, a number of folks that have joined through the self-serve platform, and of course, the Miami Dolphins, which we're really excited about, and happened a lot earlier than we would have thought. We're excited with the cloud, and we remain opportunistic as we go forward with it.
Okay, I think it's 4:30 P.M., so I think our time has come up, but yeah, operator, should we pass it back to you?
Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude the Rumble Inc presentation. You may now disconnect. The next session will begin shortly. Please consult the conference agenda for the next presenting company.