Rumble, a video platform that bills itself as “neutral” and “immune to cancel culture,” published a letter to embattled podcast host Joe Rogan on Tuesday, asking him to leave Spotify and distribute The Joe Rogan Experience through its service for $100 million, as the company prepares for an ambitious public offering next quarter that it hopes will value the company at $2 billion.
On Saturday, January 23, 2021, the Rumble video platform logo is shown on a laptop computer in Hastings on Hudson, New York, USA.
Rumble offered Rogan “100 million dollars over four years” for his whole library of broadcasts in a letter signed by CEO Chris Pavlovski—the same amount of money Rogan was supposedly paid by Spotify in 2020 when it became the sole publisher of his podcast—and promised “no censorship.”
Over 70 episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience were removed from Spotify on Sunday following widespread criticism of Rogan’s use of racial slurs on the show—though Ek stated in a letter apologising to employees that the episodes were removed at Rogan’s request and that Rogan’s show would remain on Spotify because “silencing” and “cancelling voices” is “not the answer.”
Rumble launched a public offering in December, supported by Cantor Fitzgerald, and stated that it hopes to raise $400 million, albeit the deal has not yet concluded.
Still, there’s plenty of doubt that partisan vehicles like Rumble can repeat the short-term success of meme stocks, and backing them appears to be “more about investing in a social statement than a gamble on future revenue flows or profits,” as Forbes reported in December.
Animosity at Rogan and his show grew last month as a result of misinformation regarding Covid-19 on his podcast. Neil Young, a musician, deleted his songs from Spotify after asking Spotify to choose between him and Rogan. Young was eager to add out that he was not arguing for censorship, but that “private firms have the freedom to select what they profit from,” just as he had the right to “not have [his] name on the internet.”
