First the users stay away, now the money is running out. Donald Trump’s heart project “Truth Social” should attack the market as a Twitter competitor. Now it faces an uncertain future.
It was barely six months ago that Donald Trump dared the large-scale attack on Twitter. With his own platform “Truth Social”, Trump also wanted to take revenge on the social networks that blocked him because of his hate messages and disinformation. But what sounded so promising for the former US President is increasingly becoming a disaster – in which Trump played a major role. Not only are users running away from the platform, but according to consistent media reports it is also slowly running out of money.
The “Washington Post” reports that there are still no signs of how the platform should generate any income at all or continue to grow. The newspaper relies on a so-called SEC Filing – a standardized document that must be submitted to the US Securities and Exchange Commission – from the company Digital World Acquisition (DWA), which plans to make Trump’s platform accessible to the general public. So far, the network is only accessible in the United States. In it, the DWA warns that the business could be permanently damaged if “President Trump continues to lose popularity or there are further controversies that damage his credibility” – an obvious reference to the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, the private residence Trumps, at the beginning of August, which puts the ex-president in need of explanations and in which new details keep coming to light.
Donald Trump’s scandals hurt the network
The DWA makes no secret of the fact that the Trump scandals have already caused considerable damage: After the share experienced a high in early March shortly after the publication of “Truth Social”, it has since fallen by 75 percent. In the last six months alone, a loss of around 6.5 million euros has been made. The DWA pointed out that Trump’s past companies had to file for bankruptcy and that there was no guarantee that this would not also threaten Trump’s digital company, the parent company of “Truth Social”.
As early as May, DWA had given little hope that the network would ever make a profit. It could be that Trump’s company “never generates any revenue or even turns a profit and if the risks are not addressed, the business could fail,” according to the report, which was submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission in May. In order for the site to generate any commercial revenue at all, it needs several million regular users, explained DWA in several reports.
There are also other signs that the network is in financial difficulties. According to a report by Fox Business, Truth Social has outstanding payments to internet host RightForge of $1.7 million. RightForge, a provider that hosts conservative websites, agreed to host Trump’s network last October. According to the report, “Truth Social” paid three bills but stopped paying in March. While RightForge chairman Martin Avila said they “fully support President Trump,” according to the Washington Post, there’s a lot going on behind the scenes. According to two unnamed sources, communication between the two parties should now only take place via lawyers.
Setback by patent authority for “Truth Social”
But the network also has other problems. At the beginning of August, the US patent authority refused to register the slogan “Truth Social” as a trademark. The authority explained in a letter that there could be confusion with the “Vero – True Social” network founded in 2015. “In this case, the trademark ‘Truth Social’ is confusingly similar to the previously registered trademarks ‘The Truth Network’ and ‘Vero – True Social’. All trademarks include a variation of the word ‘Truth’, meaning that the trademarks for the average user are very similar,” says the Patent Office’s justification.
In addition, users are increasingly leaving the network. As early as May, the star reported that the number of downloads of the app was falling rapidly. While there were 170,000 downloads in the Apple Store on the first day, in May the number was only 8,000 downloads per day. And the number of page views and active users is also dwindling, even if the numbers recently rose again after the raid in Mar-a-Lago. “Truth Social” currently has an average of 300,000 page views per day – a fifth of what the network had when it started in February. This is also reflected in the activities in the network: Even with trending topics, only a few thousand users participate per day – in the USA alone, Trump’s archenemy Twitter has 37 million active users daily.
Sources: Washington Post, Fox Business, DWA Report to the Securities and Exchange Commission, US Patent Office