Rumble Shares Continue Climb on Barstool Sports Video Deal
Barstool Sports and online video platform Rumble announced a wide-ranging video deal on Monday that will see upstart Rumble become the preferred video home of Barstool, compete with an advertising partnership.
Rumble users will get access to all Barstool Sports content, including live streams. Barstool will use Rumble’s cloud computing storage and network capabilities, according to a release the companies issued Monday.
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“With the power of Barstool Sports, we are going to help Rumble be the top player video, cloud and livestreaming space,” Barstool founder and owner Dave Portnoy said in a statement.
The power of the Barstool brand revealed itself in the stock market reaction, which saw Rumble shares rally 63% Monday and Tuesday on the largest volume the business has seen since it came public in 2022 by SPAC merger. Shares added 43% Monday and are up another 20% in mid-morning trading on the Nasdaq Stoick Market. Rumble’s recent price of $5.85 is it’s highest price in four months.
Analysts, meanwhile, were more measured, noting it doesn’t appear the Barstool content deal is exclusive to Rumble.
“We believe this follows a dispute between Barstool Sports and YouTube, which forced Barstool Sports to remove episodes of ‘Surviving Barstool’ from YouTube on 11/30, citing simulated violence,” Oppenheimer & Co analyst Jed Kelly, said in a note to clients Monday. “Based on our reading of the press release, we believe [Rumble] will participate in ad revenue, but will not be the exclusive seller of Barstool Sports video ad inventory or live-read ads. As a reminder, [Rumble] keeps 40% of ad revenue generated through its site and third parties and 10% of ad revenue generated through videos distributed on YouTube.”
Barstool Sports has grown its audience by 194% over the past three years and tallied 1.6 billion podcast downloads, according to the company. Portnoy’s company says it reaches 200 million people across social media platforms. Barstool had briefly been a division of betting-focused Penn National Gaming, but the business sold Barstool back to Portnoy in in August for $1.
(This story has been updated in the headline and in the fourth paragraph with details of Rumble’s extended rally.)
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