Podcast Advertising
Rumble Invites SimonTV to Pimp Pharmaceuticals
Some of the social media sites offer various forms of monetisation once you exceed certain thresholds. Typically these are revenue-sharing arrangements from the advertisements the platforms insert into your videos.
For small creators such as myself this revenue-sharing doesn’t amount to much, which is why many creators seek to monetise in other ways such as through sponsorships, subscriptions and merchandising.
A new opportunity arose this week for livestreamers which isn’t attractive for me but I think might gain traction. It’s an offering from the video-sharing platform Rumble, whereby the presenter reads a script and if they perform it well enough, they're approved for revenue sharing based on the number of viewers.
I think Rumble will do well out of this because Rumble Studio also has an aggregation feature. How this works is you livestream to Rumble and Rumble send the video out to your channels on other platforms. Because Rumble is counting the number of users on those platforms too, you the creator earns from audience views on those other platforms as well as Rumble.
In this model Rumble essentially becomes the portal through which creators aggregate their streams and earn advertising revenue. Sounds great but it’s not for me.
This is the Rumble Studio interface. You can see in the middle there’s a “Secondary” platform configured, Owncast. I could add in any other platform here too, including the major sites like X, Youtube and Twitch out-of-the-box.
For many livestreamers -perhaps most- this is an attractive proposition. You don’t need to wait to build up an audience on each of the platforms in order to earn: Rumble rewards you for audience numbers on other platforms. The benefit for me is that very little of my audience (a couple of dozen) tune in on Rumble on average. I can get paid for the ~2,000 who tune in each week across the other platforms.
(At least in theory: I haven’t tested out how the integration with the other platforms works, and I suspect the viewer numbers Rumble determines on other platforms is reliant upon API calls that not all of the other platforms offer.)
The other attraction is network bandwidth optimisation: rather than consuming your own bandwidth sending out individual streams to each of the platforms you only send out one, and Rumble uses its own bandwidth to aggregate your livestream to the other platforms. Sensible.
But there’s a cost. On the right is one of the Ad Reads available for me to monetise. Here’s the full text:
Instructions
"Please emphasize the phone number clearly: 1-888-350-1353. Focus on the connection to President Trump's recent drug pricing policies. Target tone should be conversational and patriotic - speaking to Americans who feel ripped off by high drug prices."
Script
"Hey everyone, tired of paying outrageous prices for your medications while other countries pay a fraction of the cost? President Trump just signed an executive order to fix this problem, but why wait?
BlockBusterHealth.com is already offering Americans these savings RIGHT NOW. We're talking up to 80% off the same exact medications you're already taking - same brands, same quality, just fair prices.
Whether it's Ozempic, insulin, or any other prescription, BlockBusterHealth connects you directly with licensed pharmacies that offer international pricing. No middlemen, no markup, just honest prices.
Call 1-888-350-1353 or visit BlockBusterHealth.com. Americans shouldn't have to choose between their health and their wallet. Check it out!"
The proposition is this: if I run all of my livestreams through Rumble’s platform and recite this advertisement for a pharmaceutical company enthusiastically enough to satisfy the advertising executives who manage these programmes, I’ll get paid.
This doesn’t suit me for a couple of reasons. The first is technical - I output two streams concurrently with slightly different output to comply with the formatting preferences and content restrictions of the social media platforms, using an aggregation solution I control myself. How I do this is documented here but the takeaway is that X, Rumble, Twitch, Telegram, and Owncast receive one version of my livestream while Substack, Youtube, Instagram and LinkedIn receive another.
Rumble Studio’s aggregation platform supports only a single stream so is unsuitable. I could configure one type of stream to be aggregated through Rumble but the cost of this is people watching on the other type of stream would still have to listen to the advertisement, for which I’m not remunerated because it doesn’t traverse Rumble’s aggregation.
The second reason is of course, moral. As Rumble’s Ad Reads solution gains prominence (I hope it does) more advertisers will be attracted, advertisers whose products I might genuinely believe are worth recommending to my audience. Right now the proposition is rather undignified: who is going to sacrifice their credibility in return for a couple of bucks pimping drugs?
No-one in my opinion, worth watching.
-SRA. Auckland, 26/vii 2025.