#Facebook director Peter Thiel invests in conservative rival Rumble

Prominent conservative venture capitalists including Peter Thiel and J.D. Vance are investing in free speech-oriented video streaming site Rumble Video, the company said Wednesday.

The deal, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, marks PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel’s first investment in a social media company since he bought a large stake of Facebook as an early investor in 2004. It also means that Thiel is supporting a competitor to Facebook while he sits on Facebook’s board. 

The round values Rumble at around $500 million, The Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter. That represents a major boost for Rumble, which aims to challenge the dominance of platforms that conservatives claim unfairly restrict free speech, including YouTube and Facebook.

Rumble’s users include popular right-wing internet personalities like Donald Trump Jr., former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, commentator Dan Bongino and writer Dinesh D’Souza.

“Rumble is in a really good position to be competition to the larger incumbent platforms,” Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski told the Post. 

Along with Thiel, the investment round is being led by “Hillbilly Elegy” author J.D. Vance’s Ohio-based venture-capital fund Narya Capital. The third sizable investor is Colt Ventures, a Texas family office led by former Trump advisor Darren Blanton. 

“We thought it was a great investment and we love the team,” Blanton told The Post. “With the Thiel group and their reach and history of investing in the space, I don’t see how it couldn’t succeed.” 

The investors approached Rumble within the past two months and the deal took shape rather quickly, a person familiar with the matter told The Post. 

Rumble was founded in 2013 and remained relatively obscure until recent months. Still, it has a long way to go if it wants to take on YouTube or Facebook. The site logged just 81 million visits in April, according to analytics firm SimilarWeb. That represents a fraction of 1 percent of YouTube’s 32.7 billion visits over the same period of time. 

But Rumble plans to use the money to quickly boost its growth. The company wants to expand availability to non-English speaking audiences, let users upload videos from its mobile app and allow all users to create livestreams, Pavlovski said. Currently, the company only lets paid users create livestreams and does not offer mobile video uploads. 

Rumble also plans to add cloud services to businesses, bringing the firm in competition with sector leaders Amazon, Google and Azure.

Despite his site’s popularity being concentrated among conservatives, Pavlovski said he wants people with all political views to join the site. He said that Rumble does not use algorithms to sort content like other platforms, but instead displays content in a straight chronological feed, helping give smaller creators a leg-up. 

“Our value prop is quite simple: it’s to offer a platform without preferencing,” he said. 

The site bans content including racism, anti-semitism, terrorism and pornography, he added. 

Another free speech-oriented alternative to mainstream social media sites, Parler, scored a victory on Monday when Apple allowed it back into its App Store. However, the company had to agree to block posts labeled “hate” on iPhones and iPads, while keeping the content up on its site, The Washington Post reported.