After former President Donald Trump was banned from Twitter in 2021, conservative entrepreneurs rushed to promote social media alternatives tailored to him and his followers.
First there were Parler and Gab, Twitter-like sites popular with the people who stormed the US Capitol on January 6. Then along came Gettr, a social media app created by one of Trump’s former advisers.
That crowded space has now shrunk, giving an advantage to Truth Social, the platform owned by Trump’s company and on which he is the star attraction.
In March, Truth Social recorded 1.5 million unique visitors in the United States when its parent company began trading on public markets, a 130 percent increase compared to the previous month, according to Similarweb, a data company that tracks . web traffic. Although the app’s visitor numbers were minuscule compared to those of major social media sites, it was 13 times the combined total of Parler and Gettr.
(The chart below shows that Truth Social had a recent boost in visitors, while other platforms have declined. Shown is the percentage change in monthly unique visitors since October 2021. Source: Similarweb by The New York Times)
Truth Social’s closest competition was Gab, a hotbed of anti-Semitic and racist posts, which attracted 246,000 unique visitors in March, according to Similarweb. (Andrew Torba, Gab’s founder, disputed that figure, saying that Gab had about 6.5 million unique visitors in March, but his numbers could not be independently verified.)
Truth Social’s performance has important consequences for Trump’s finances. When the app’s parent company, Trump Media & Technology Group, went public on the Nasdaq last month, it reached a valuation of $8 billion. Trump, who owns nearly 58 percent of the company, suddenly became billions of dollars richer, offering him a financial lifeline as he faces paying hundreds of millions of dollars in legal bills related to the cases. civil and criminal charges against them.
However, just because Truth Social is more popular than some of its competitors doesn’t mean it has a viable business.
Since March, Trump Media’s stock price has plummeted, reducing Trump’s stake to about $2 billion. In securities filings this month, the company revealed that its 2023 revenue was $4.1 million, all from advertising, with losses of $58 million.
Truth Social has outperformed the competition primarily because its rivals have faltered. Gettr was plunged into uncertainty last year when a key investor was arrested on fraud charges. Gab is not available on major app stores, which banned it in 2017 for allowing hate speech. And Parler is trying to prepare for a comeback, after temporarily closing a year ago amid an ownership shakeup.
Truth Social is “the best of several unpopular or very niche platforms,” said Josephine Lukito, a social media expert at the University of Texas at Austin who has studied Truth Social. “Even with Donald Trump, it doesn’t have the level of popularity that a traditional platform has.”
Truth Social remains a far cry from X, formerly known as Twitter, which has lifted restrictions on fringe political voices since Elon Musk bought it in 2022. Trump’s platform, according to Similarweb.
In a statement, Trump Media spokesperson Shannon Devine said Truth Social had a highly engaged audience of “millions of users,” with thousands of new members every day. Devine noted that the company had more than $200 million in the bank and no debt.
Trump Media has not revealed much about the level of activity on Truth Social. In its corporate documents, the company omits data that social media companies typically track closely, such as the number of monthly or daily active users. The company has not “relied on any particular key performance metrics to make business or operational decisions,” as those statistics promote “short-term decision making,” according to one of the documents.
However, Truth Social enjoys a crucial advantage over other right-wing apps: Trump.
After Twitter banned him from posting messages inciting violence on January 6, 2021, two former contestants on his reality show, The newbie, They contacted Trump. They offered to put him at the center of a new platform that would not censor his posts. Trump obtained a deal with Truth Social that gave him a majority stake in the company.
For now, Gab remains Truth Social’s closest competitor. However, the platform, founded in 2016, has faced problems for years. In 2017, Google and Apple removed it from their app stores, citing the proliferation of hate speech.
Gab’s monthly average decreased nearly 40 percent from 2022 to 2023, according to Similarweb. In an email, Gab’s Torba said those numbers were incorrect because Similarweb relies on data from third-party analytics providers that its app doesn’t use. Tom Liu, vice president of Similarweb, responded that the company also worked with Internet service providers to collect data and used a common methodology across all the websites he evaluated.
Before Trump Media’s IPO last month, there were signs that Truth Social’s growth was stalling. The site attracted about 100,000 new users in the six months before the public offering, according to estimates by the Stanford University Internet Observatory, compared with almost 250,000 users in the same period a year earlier. However, in March, the site’s user count skyrocketed to more than 100,000.
As part of a public company, Truth Social has other advantages, including publicly traded stock that it could use to make acquisitions or increase hiring. On Tuesday, Trump Media said it was about to launch a video streaming service that will focus in part on “content that has been canceled.”
The platform has also outperformed its rivals in attracting other conservative candidates, Lukito said. Ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, 54 Republican candidates posted on Truth Social, according to his research, compared to 37 on Gettr.
Those numbers are still minuscule compared to X, where messages from 363 Republican candidates were posted.
