There’s a gigantic community of gun people hanging out on popular social media video platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. All of the popular influencers focus on these platforms, because that’s where the traffic can be found. There’s only one problem with this strategy: these companies, at their core, are anti-gun. If you’re making your living as a gun advocate on their platforms, you’re risking everything to the whims of people that don’t share your values. With the mere push of a button, each of these platforms could take down all of your content and you’d have no recourse.

There are alternatives. Rumble and Twitter/X are extremely gun friendly, but don’t seem to have the same communities. For instance, in a comparison of YouTube and Rumble it was found that:

Rumble revealed exponential year-over-year revenue growth, from just $2.9M in Q4 of 2021 to $19.9M in Q4 of 2022. This represents an increase of 686.2% over just one year. 

Compare that to Youtube, which saw a 2021-to-2022 YoY decline in revenue during its Q4 earnings. The Alphabet sub-business raked in a record $8.633B in revenue during Q4 of 2021, compared to a still massive $7.963B in Q4 of 2022. 

If you thought Youtube’s 33.5X multiple on Rumble’s MAU’s was steep, the difference in revenue is even steeper. Despite Youtube’s 2022 decrease, the video giant still took in 400-times the amount of revenue that Rumble received in Q4.

Uploading a short video to YouTube can take several minutes. Rumble’s upload seems even slower. For people producing dozens of videos per week, that extra time doesn’t seem worth it for a share of 400x less revenue. All the popular video production tools, with Adobe Premiere leading the pack, have built in exports to Facebook and YouTube but sending a video to Rumble requires exporting and then uploading. It’s easy to see how a workflow can get created and the extra step of sending the video to Rumble seems like too much work.

This is extremely short sighted thinking. As YouTube showed during 2020, they are willing to perform backflips to please their government masters. Remember when the Bakersfield Doctors were taken down from YouTube for misinformation? Every single thing they said in that video turned out to be correct, except that they overestimated the lethality of covid. YouTube already has an anti-gun policy in place. If you’re positing firearms related content that stays on the “right” side of the line according to YouTube, they could move that line with a couple of keystrokes. All of your content would be gone in an instant.

Let’s say that happens. We’re really only one mass shooting that fits the proper narrative away from that type of action. Will people interested in gun content suddenly stop watching videos? Of course not, they’ll move to the platforms that still provide that content. The people that are posting on both YouTube and Rumble will survive and prosper. The people that relied solely upon YouTube will be crushed.

Likewise, if your website is a 1990s style brochure and most of your online presence is a Facebook page, you are asking to be destroyed. Firearms are at the top of Facebook’s list of things you cannot post for sale. You can’t even advertise gun safes on Facebook. If you’re putting content up on Facebook, you need to make sure that content is also available somewhere else. Otherwise, you’re just a few keystrokes from being digitally erased.

Reddit has been a fairly gun friendly place, but it’s in the process of an Initial Public Offering. As a public company, it’s going to have to deal with ESG requirements. Reddit already has some troubling rules on firearms and it has a mostly left wing user base. A firearms business cannot depend upon Reddit without taking an existential risk.

Why are firearms businesses so heavily committed to these mainstream platforms instead of the newer platforms? Some of it is economic since it makes sense to fish where the most fish are. But there’s also an age issue. As an industry, we’re old and Facebook is for old people. People are using the platforms where they’re most comfortable, and these new platforms such as Rumble take them out of their comfort zone.

This is a matter of survival for the firearms industry. Relying upon Silicon Valley to be your marketing presence is suicide. It’s only a matter of time before they cancel you. Things have been unfolding exactly as predicted, and Alvin Bragg’s prosecution starts jury selection in less than two weeks. This will be manipulated to cause exactly the narrative needed to cancel the industry. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Spread your content around, even to the sites that you think aren’t worth it now.