Andrew Tate made his first online live appearance on Rumble since his arrest at the beginning of 2023. Rumble the video hosting and streaming platform hyped up the stream with their online social media presence, advertising a count down for Andrew Tate to go live. Tweeting before the stream began that the livestream had over 1M views before the stream even began.
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Rumble and Kick Streaming Success
Since Twitches recent policy changes to reduce the ability for streamers to show ads on their streams and a reduction in revenue share for viewer subscriptions both Kick and Rumble have began to see a migration of users to their platforms.
Rumble claims to be a free speech and non-censorship platform compared to other media sharing sites such as Youtube. They have basic rules about what is allowed on the platform but avoid creating policies based on opinion such as ‘hate speech’ or ‘misinformation’. This fresh point of view has created a new media hosting platform that lots of users find more compatible with how they digest content.
Rumbles Record For Concurrent Viewers
Rumble has moved away from using public cloud service providers such as AWS or Microsoft Azure as they do not want their infrastructure to be shut down by third party services for having a service with policies that do not align with these other Silicon Valley platforms. Solving one problem can lead to another due to the capital cost required to create a private cloud being much more expensive than using ‘consumption-based’ services like AWS or Azure.
Andrew Tates rumble stream broke history on the site with the largest concurrent viewership ever.
Although claims have been disputed that this was not in the top 5 largest streams of all time, it is a feat in its own that a video hosting platform using on premise infrastructure was able to stream with this many concurrent viewers.
Rumble Claims To Sue Google
Since the live stream ended, Rumble used their Twitter account to express their concern about rankings within Google, mentioning that when searching “emergency meeting” the results have a ‘preferential treatment of Youtube’ and they will are “suing Google” for this.
Google has its fair share of news stories since its inception. Googles behaviour around censorship or ranking searches has been reasonably consistent over time. Many who work in businesses for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) trying to rank websites based on algorithms know about the struggle it can be to have your information ranked as the top search result.
Previously Google has made decisions to de-rank websites such as Alex Jones Infowars, aligning to the censorship of Chinas “Great firewall of China’ as well as their ongoing censorship of popular videos on their Youtube platform, which have faced much criticism in the post-covid pandemic world. Google’s platform can make or break a business, reputation and even an election with the power of its media sharing, search and advertising.
Rumble VS Google, Who Wins?
“BuT tHey ArE a PrIvAtE CoMpAnY”
Google are a private company which means they have complete control over what does and does-not appear on their platform – within reason. Google and their subsidiaries does remove or change content depending on government or private business requests such as Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) requests. Due to this, it may be that Google is allowed to promote their content before competitors as it’s their platform.
If a TV station has a special interest such as owning a different type of business then they would run ads during their breaks, sometimes cutting out competition willing to pay for the time. This is a similar scenario and it’s hard to tell that a TV station would be banned from favouring their own organisations.
There have been cases in the past where Google has simply chosen not to serve countries that disagree with their service. This almost happened in Australia when there was a law being passed about Google and Facebook having to pay news providers for drawing attention to their platforms with their content.
“Google had threatened to withdraw its primary search engine from Australia”
As Australia won this battle against Google, may Rumble does stand a chance.
They won’t win. Google is omnipotent. First, see where you rank with other search engines – then if you’re number 1 on ALL the others, then come back with your lawsuit.