Former President Donald Trump hit the jackpot this spring when his social media company finally went public.
Even though Trump Media & Technology Group DJT generates very little revenue, investors are assigning an eye-popping valuation north of $9 billion to the company. Trump’s dominant stake in Trump Media is now valued at nearly $6 billion.
Yet new data shows its main product — the conservative-friendly social network Truth Social — remains a very tiny player in its industry, and it’s getting even smaller.
Truth Social’s average number of daily active US users on iOS and Android dropped by 19% year over year in April to about 113,000, according to data shared exclusively with CNN from Similarweb, a data intelligence company.
Lordy that number is embarrassing, when comparing to Mastodon’s MAU count over 847k.
And people actually paid money for this shit penny-stock.
lemmy is slowly catching up at 46k monthly active users, according to this: https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy
New Lemmings, we salute you!
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While that’s true, the company’s revenue was also shit. So they have no users and are bringing in little money. And also somehow have huge expenditures.
I would imagine that having lawsuits between people at the top of the company trying to get the ability to cash out sooner is not very encouraging either.
And the SEC finding that their auditing company was involved in large-scale accounting fraud probably doesn’t help.
EDIT: Apparently this is merely their latest accounting company. Their first one resigned, and they just kicked the second out to start using the third one that just got banned for conducting bogus audits on other companies.
You want a criminal defense attorney.
Is this a euphemism for money laundering?
It was created to launder foreign money.
AKA: useful idiots.
There might be some limited value to politicians, but not anything like the current valuation.
I mean, politicians run their own mailing lists, have lists of people to contact already, and there are already political forums out there.
At least some of it is retail investors who politically believe in Trump, don’t have any idea what they’re doing, and are getting sold a pretty terrible deal. My understanding is that there’s been some discussion over the high proportion of retail investors involved.
He might walk away with a lot of their money, but I gotta believe that that’s gonna hurt his presidential campaign. If you plow a bunch of your life savings into the guy and he walks off with them, you may not be feeling too friendly towards him afterwards.
Those would be the same as the normal audience for “truth” social.
I’m sure that there’s substantial overlap between the “user” and “investor” groups.
Bots click on ads repeatedly like a champ. Only the best bot-clicks.
Their profits were also mediocre with huge expenses (and their product is built from Mastodon). It is clear that the whole thing exists to launder foreign money.
While I don’t disagree that Truth Social is wildly overvalued and compares poorly to many other social media networks, daily average users and monthly average users are two different metrics. You can’t directly compare them; daily average users will be a number smaller than monthly average users for a given network.
You are comparing a daily active users figure to a monthly active users figure. Truth Social has closer to 2 million active users overall, but only 100,000 on a given day. It’s still really low for a social media company with such a popular public figure at the forefront, but it isn’t lower than Mastodon. The valuation is absolutely absurd regardless as there are so many red flags in their own SEC filings.
Add to it that Truth Social is actually running on Mastodon software.