Overview
Gab's vision is to build technology that empowers people to speak freely without fear of censorship or deplatforming. This vision is exciting and important because it recognizes the tremendous value of protecting free speech for all people in order to encourage diverse opinions and ideas.
Since 2016 Gab has built and maintained communication platforms that are protected by the most pro-First Amendment Terms of Service in the world. We have fostered a community with tens of millions of people who cherish the ability to speak freely and gain access to information, news, and knowledge that cannot be found anywhere else online.
Our values are grounded in our Christian faith in Jesus Christ and we welcome those from all religious backgrounds—or no religious background at all—to join our community and speak freely.
The Problem
Gab was founded in 2016 by Andrew Torba, a Christian technology entrepreneur and best-selling author who left Silicon Valley to start Gab after he saw the rise in censorship from platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter during the 2016, and later 2020, presidential election.
As a result of our free speech principles, Gab has been no-platformed and banned by more than 25 service providers over the years, including both the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store, payment processors, and hosting providers.
Gab and Andrew have been relentlessly smeared by Big Tech, the mainstream media, academics, members of U.S. Congress, foreign nation-states and more for refusing to censor first amendment-protected political speech on Gab.
Despite these challenges, Gab has become more resilient by depending solely on our community of users from around the world to support the site and by building our own in-house infrastructure from the ground up.
Solution
Gab has one principal moderation rule: regardless of whether Gab’s administrators, outside activist pressure groups, “cancel culture” Internet mobs, the media, governments, or any other persons or entities agree with any Gab user’s political viewpoints, we strive to ensure that, wherever possible, any Gab user’s political speech that is protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution will be allowed on the platform.
Political speech which is unlawful in the United States, not protected by the First Amendment, or which in our reasonable opinion will lead to unlawful activity such as offline harassment is not permitted on the site. Such content includes threats of violence, doxxing, illegal transactions, child exploitation, and pornography. This makes Gab unique not only among the Big Tech established social networks and also against competitors in the “alt-tech” landscape as well.
The vast majority of the moderation on our platform is done by our users themselves. Users can block, mute, unfollow and moderate their own groups as they please. Free association is an important part of protecting free speech and Gab gives users the tools to create and shape their own experience.
Gab is the only alternative technology platform to have a fully integrated infrastructure, designed for resilience because it is separate and independent from Big Tech cloud platforms and infrastructure. We have our own servers, our own payment processor and our own in-house technology tools. These resources allow us to operate free from outside influence and pressure to censor First Amendment protected speech which is prevalent elsewhere on the Internet.
The Market
We welcome all people to speak freely. We believe it is necessary to defend the free speech and privacy rights of every person, whether our management agrees with any individual person’s beliefs or not.
As censorship undertaken by major platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and Youtube grows, particularly where this appears to be done at the behest of authoritarian domestic politicians and foreign regimes alike, there is a risk that social media networks’ need to curry favor with government will effectively limit the scope of Americans’ free speech rights. Every American, and indeed every human being, deserves a safe place to engage in public, and where necessary anonymous, legal expression.
Gab believes in American values around political freedom and strives to create a space on the Internet where political values that informed the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights are safe. The site strives to protect all expression that is legal in the United States and to adhere to a content-neutral policy with regard to content moderation decisions. By adhering to these rules, and by basing our operations in the United States, we believe that we are in a unique position to extend crucial American civil liberties protections to every corner of the planet.
As mainstream social networks continue to crack down on "objectionable content," remove or heavily moderate online comment sections, and censor dissenting views, we believe the need for alternative platforms will continue to rise. We also believe the trend of "cutting the cord" will continue as the popularity of streaming content over the internet increases.
We believe these needs will result in more and more people using the Internet for commerce and social interaction, which we believe will accelerate the fragmentation process of the social networking ecosystem into smaller niche communities with shared values, ideals, and codes of conduct. The global social networking platforms market is evaluated at US$192.950 billion for the year 2019 and is projected to grow at a CAGR of 25.38% to reach a market size of US$939.679 billion by the year 2026.
Our Products and Services
It is important to understand that Gab is not merely building an alternative social networking service. We seek to build a parallel internet and a parallel economy where anyone who wishes to use our services lawfully may do so, regardless of their political beliefs and how they may choose to express those beliefs through the use of our services. Our services span from social networking, to video hosting, to payment processing, to video conferencing, and to advertising technology. Because we are banned from both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, we have developed a PWA (Progressive Web App) which can install an app-like version of Gab on Android and iOS devices without permission from Apple and Google.
Gab Social is our social networking platform. The product is a cross between Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook. Gab allows its users to create usernames and mention one another like Twitter while also providing the practical functionality for commerce and community building like Facebook and Reddit. Gab Social is monetized with Gab Ads as well as with GabPRO, our optional subscription service. Gab Social features direct messaging, groups, and all of the standard features and functionality consumers expect from a modern social network such as notifications, feeds and a profile page.
Gab Marketplace is a feature within Gab Social where users can buy and sell goods and services from one another. The Marketplace is great for small business owners and entrepreneurs who are just getting their business started. It is also a great resource for users who have things around the house that they want to get rid of. The Gab community uses the Marketplace in a wide variety of ways including for job postings, classifieds and direct commerce. The Marketplace has a wide variety of categories and we plan to soon integrate GabPay into Marketplace to facilitate transactions among users.
Gab TV is our free speech video hosting platform. It has similar functionality to YouTube. Users can upload video content and embed, share and comment on it. Gab TV is monetized in two ways. The first is that we have a daily upload limit for free users, similar to Vimeo’s business model. Users can upgrade to GabPRO—our paid subscription service— for increased video size and bandwidth limits. Secondly, we have pre-roll advertisements on all Gab TV videos. Free users are shown Gab TV pre-roll video ads, while GabPRO users are not.
Gab Voice is our video conferencing and live streaming platform. GabPRO subscribers can create Gab Voice rooms that are private or public. They can host video calls and audio-only calls, and also share their screen with other viewers. Think of it as Zoom, in the web browser, with a live streaming component.
Our Business Model
Gab Ads is our in-house advertising platform that launched in September 2021. Businesses, brands and users can use Gab Ads to run ad campaigns on Gab Social and Gab TV. Gab Ads can be targeted by location, device, and interest. Advertisers pay based on CPM (cost per 1,000 views) with a variable CPM of $2-5 depending on the advertiser’s targeting and placement options. Gab Ad types include standard infeed image ads, in-feed video ads, comment ads, and Gab TV pre-roll ads.
GabPay is our in-house payment processor. GabPay collects 1.9% + $0.15 per transaction. We built GabPay after Gab was banned from payment processors like Paypal, Stripe, Square and many more. GabPay is a Paypal and Stripe alternative that is powering the parallel economy on Gab. We use GabPay to process our own transactions and are also onboarding other businesses to provide payment processing services to them. GabPay operates as a peer-to-peer payment processing platform, with a similar experience to Paypal. As part of our operational plan for 2023 we plan to integrate GabPay into all of Gab’s services for things like tipping, e-commerce, and monetization of content for Gab users.
GabPRO is our premium-user subscription program. We collect subscription fees primarily from credit cards at the beginning of the subscription period. Subscription revenues are recognized ratably over the subscription period, ranging from one month to one year, net of estimated cancellations. GabPRO unlocks additional features on Gab Social such as the ability to get verified—and also the ability to use Gab Voice, our video conferencing platform. GabPRO is $15/month, $99/year, or $500 for a lifetime membership. GabPRO users can optionally enable or disable ads.
Gab also sells a variety of merchandise featuring pro-America, pro-freedom, pro-God, and pro-family messaging, among other things, as a revenue stream on our Dissenter Shop. These products include items like hats, shirts, mugs, phone cases, and other merchandise.
Our Traction
We launched into private invite-only beta in August 2016. As of December 15th, 2022, we have over 5,940,109 cumulative registered user accounts and had 85.8 million monthly visits from 20.12 million unique visitors in the previous 30 days. We believe that the vast majority of registered accounts are unique users based on confirmed email addresses and unique IP addresses.
There may be some users who register accounts with different e-mail addresses or switch IP addresses using a VPN, which we cannot account for in our data. Gab has been able to successfully generate millions of dollars in revenue to support and grow our community through our subscription service, advertising revenue, and merchandise sales.
A user does not need to have a registered account in order to use and explore the vast majority of Gab’s services. A registered user account is required only to post content on the site. Our community tends to follow what Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell refer to as the "1% rule” of online communities, an anecdotal rule of thumb which in general terms states that 1% of community members create original content, 9% engage or share that content, and 90% passively consume that content. We consider the 20 million+ unique visitors who passively read content on Gab to be "users" of the service. For clarity we designate a difference between "registered users" and "unique visitors."
We are able to monetize the traffic from all classes of users including unique visitors who do not have a registered account on the site, since all public feeds on Gab contain advertisements.
Competitive Alt-Tech Landscape: Gab Is The Market Leader
According to Wolfram Alpha as of October, 2022, Gab has more traffic – in terms of hits per day – than all other alt-tech microblogging platforms combined, despite not having access to app stores, cloud hosting providers, and other services that all other competitors in the space still depend on to operate.
A Pew Research report dated October 6th, 2022 about Gab and competitors BitChute, Gettr, Parler, Rumble, Telegram, and Truth Social said “just one site – Gab – does not appear to moderate content in the same way other sites do. While Gab does take steps to remove spam and follow legal requirements… researchers did not find examples of the site removing posts or accounts due to misinformation or offensive content.”
Other alt-tech microblogging platforms rely on Big Tech infrastructure to operate and because of this they have the same exact terms of service and censorship policies that Big Tech platforms require. Some of our competitors use AI systems like Hive Moderation to automatically censor content and all of them have some form of dependency on Big Tech infrastructure such as the app stores, cloud hosting, and even Google Ads in order to operate, thus defeating the purpose of claiming to be a free speech alternative to Big Tech.
Exposure to forced Big Tech censorship isn't a problem for Gab. We have already built our own resilient in-house infrastructure that we control called the Gab Cloud. This gives us the unique opportunity in the marketplace to provide a true free speech platform, which, judging by Gab’s advantage in user traffic over that of alt-tech microblogging competitors, we believe the market wants.
Become A Gab Shareholder and Join Us On Our Mission To Defend Free Speech
Free speech is the cornerstone of modern society and a fundamental human right. In the age of the internet social media has become a primary platform for people to express their opinions and ideas while getting access to information, news, and knowledge. Many people feel that mainstream social media platforms do not allow them to express themselves freely. They feel that their voices are being silenced or censored and that their opinions are not welcome on these platforms.
When people are free to express themselves it fosters innovation, creativity, and critical thinking. It allows for the exchange of ideas and perspectives and it can lead to the discovery of new solutions to complex problems. Free speech is essential for a healthy and thriving society. Free speech must be protected, defended, and preserved for future generations and that's exactly what Gab intends to do.
We invite you to become partners with on this journey to defend free speech online for all people by investing today.
