Tom Forte: Great. And then, my second question is, historically you’ve experienced spikes in usage and engagement on your platform during elections. How should investors think about the potential for that to occur again this year with the upcoming presidential election?
Chris Pavlovski: Yes. So, I think that like what we saw in the 2022 mid-terms was a good picture of what we can see in 2024. Obviously, this is a presidential, so it’s going to be different. And, how that shapes out to be remains to be seen. But definitely, the major difference here between 2022 and 2024 is that, in 2022, our products was lacking, it needed a lot of changes, a lot of updates, a lot of upgrades. We are now there. So, what excites me about this year is that, we have a real opportunity to capture that growth. And hopefully, I’m very confident that we’re going to be able to not only capture it, but be able to keep it and be able to really grow subsequent to that. So, I think that’s the major difference. We have a solid product now. The video product has really come a long way, and we’re really looking forward to taking advantage of this election year into the future years.
Tom Forte: Great. So, one more, and then I’ll get back in the queue. So, RFK Jr. is running as an independent for President and is on your platform. How has he done on Rumble? And, can you provide an update on left-wing independent and influencers outside of politics joining and using Rumble?
Chris Pavlovski: Yes. So, we recently announced that RFK, not only is he an account on Rumble where he’s live streaming, he just live streamed his event yesterday where he announced his VP, but he also has become a cloud customer using our cloud. So, that’s been an important development. With respect to like expanding content into different areas that are not political, we in this quarter, in the first quarter of 2024, we closed a partnership with Barstool Sports, which was a very important one in the sports category. And, what I liked most about that partnership with Dave Portnoy is that, he was more interested in taking equity in Rumble, and really believing in the mission than taking more cash. So, the deal is mostly equity and some cash. And, on the equity side, it’s not material on the share issuance side of things.
Tom Forte: Great. I’ll get back in the queue.
Operator: We now have a follow-up from Jason from Oppenheimer. Please proceed.
Jason Helfstein: Thanks. A few more. So, maybe just on Barstool, I mean, obviously, there’s a lot of content on the platform. Like, could we actually see the Barstool distribution partnership as a potential driver of engagement? I don’t know, like in second quarter or just you have a lot of content and while it’s quality content, it just, it doesn’t move the needle. Just can you get some perspective like, should we expect a bump on that distribution deal?
Chris Pavlovski: Hi, Jason. So, with respect to Barstool, what we did see in January versus over February is they definitely grew on the platform and pushed more viewers. In terms of like providing like guidance on them specifically, I can’t do that. But generally speaking, what we’re trying to do here is really kind of build the Rumble sports category in a way that kind of really allows and keeps the sports users onto the platform for longer. And, that’s kind of been, that was kind of the strategy with politics. As you grow the political side, there’s one creator that someone might watch, they find another creator and it’s all kind of within the same area. The same thing we kind of see with sports, you bring in a massive sporting event like Power Slap or Street League Skateboarding and you kind of want to keep them, you kind of want to know, you want the user to know that they can also find Barstool, and they can find 75 different podcasts that Barstool might do.
So, I call that drifting into different categories a little bit, and different types of content, but that’s kind of the reason why we wanted Barstool on the platform to really kind of broaden that sports category. But like as a whole, the amount of content in all the different verticals, I don’t see a single creator, well, in the sense moving the needle in any significant way, although we did see Street League Skateboarding in the fourth quarter really kind of moved the needle in December. So it could happen, but hard to say.
Jason Helfstein: Okay. And then just on RAC, I mean, obviously, there’s always risk in any business, but I mean, just given where you are with the product development, and it sounds like the numbers you’ve seen in March, I mean, is that what’s ultimately driving your confidence in the second quarter revenue ramp, just that like RAC is out and you’ve actually seen kind of numbers now that it’s in full execution?
Chris Pavlovski: Yes, that’s right. RAC is doing a lot of different things now that we weren’t doing in the fourth quarter of last year. We’re really adding a lot of publishers and bringing a lot more inventory. We have websites like the Drudge Report testing RAC. We have Breitbart testing RAC. We have countless different publishers now testing RAC. You also have Rumble, which is starting to open up pre-roll inventory within the app and that’s bringing inventory in. So, we’re seeing kind of like the perfect storm of inventory, really kind of adding in and we see a very good path when it comes to being able to add inventory into the system, both through Rumble and publishers. And, we see a lot of open ground there. And, just also on the flip side, we see the advertiser growth happening too, as we bring in more advertisers into the system, we’re not seeing the drop off on the CPM that one might expect.
