Right-wing platform Rumble offers Joe Rogan $100 million to leave Spotify

Video hosting website Rumble offered the embattled Joe Rogan $100 million to bring his mega-hit podcast to their platform, Fox News reported.

"Hey @joerogan," Rumble tweeted on Monday morning, "we are ready to fight alongside you. See the note from our CEO," Chris Pavlovski.

Rumble bills itself as an anti-censorship platform and is popular with the American right.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Attached to the tweet was an image of a letter to Rogan that read, "We stand with you, your guests, and your legion of fans in desire for real conversation. So we'd like to offer you 100 million reasons to make the world a better place. How about you bring all your shows to Rumble, both old and new, for 100 million bucks over four years?"

"This," the letter concluded, "is our chance to save the world. And yes, this is totally legit."

In 2020, Rogan signed a $100 million deal with Spotify giving the platform exclusive distribution rights to his podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience. Rogan still owns the actual content. At the time of the deal, The Wall Street Journal said it was "a multiyear licensing agreement for an amount of time that couldn't be learned," so it is unclear whether Rogan could break his deal with Spotify even if he wanted to.

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek released an employee memo Friday confirming that the platform will not drop Rogan.

"I do not believe that silencing Joe is the answer. We should have clear lines around content and take action when they are crossed, but canceling voices is a slippery slope," Ek wrote.

Rogan has drawn criticism in recent weeks for interviewing Drs. Robert Malone and Peter McCullough — both of whom have been accused of spreading COVID-19 misinformation — and for his past use of the N-word, for which he apologized Saturday.

Over 100 episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience have been removed from Spotify at Rogan's request, Ek wrote.