When advertisers wanted to cut @dbongino, we cut them. Now we have a resilient advertiser base that loves our creators and audience

Power move (and also morally upstanding)

A publication or a platform can not allow itself to be dictated to by its advertisers. Sure, listen to their concerns, as Chris explained that Rumble did in the last paragraph of the quoted press release but for journalistic integrity, you can not allow yourself to become their whipping boy. Serve your readers or, in the case of a platform, your users and this will generate a loyal readership / userbase that will be very attractive to the right advertisers (who are a good match for that readership).

Advertising (I personally hate to concede) does have its place but it needs to be a servile place. It needs to only be shown to viewers who have potential interest, who are amenable to being shown ads that may be of interest to them, and it should never be trying to manipulate its audience (as so much advertising unfortunately does). These lines must be actively maintained because they will be continually pushed against by the bad eggs.

Something that Elon deserved commendation on, I believe, is that his companies (specifically Tesla) never advertised. (They did marketing, but never bought advertising.) He's toyed with the idea of running a few ads recently but you can see his heart's not really in it. If you build a superior product then it will build its own buzz and you'll get 'organic' advertising, which is people with a genuine interest / enthusiasm for the product talking about it amongst themselves and to interested newcomers. That's what Elon has relied upon, to great success. So I don't know how well equipped he is for dealing with the mainstream advertising world as a revenue stream for his media platform. It's good that he made it that advertisers could be 'community noted'; that was a promising sign (even though I have reservations about the community notes system). The hire of Yaccarino though, was definitely not a good sign. There are other dubious signs too. Ultimately, Twitter was a product of the advertising supported "Web 2.0" which has been so harmful and toxic to free speech on the net and it's a gigantic task to wrest it back into a more healthy space and revenue base and I personally doubt if Elon has the skills and insights to achieve that.

Ultimately, I believe that the client/server model is doomed, as the cost of running servers is crippling and centralises power way too much. So I believe any company that continues to rely on that model, including Rumble, is built on a fundamentally flawed approach. We've got to move to peer to peer decentralised platforms that run on open protocols and I see some very promising new entries in that space (finally), namely Keet & Nostr.