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Truth Social reports $73M net loss since launch
- defrost 3y ago> Trump Media & Technology Group's (TMTG) independent registered public accounting firm . . . Should we take any figures from such as source as gospel?
- DonHopkins 3y agoI don't want to hurt anyone's sensitive feelings, but Gospel isn't Truth either, so yes. Oh, boo hoo.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- rchaud 3y agoThey phrased it strangely but I interpreted the sentence to mean 'the public accountancy firm hired to do Truth Social's books'. They are effectively warning that the company may not be a going concern for much longer.
- mrtksn 3y agoIt must be a loss leader for the gains through political influence.
- Hamuko 3y agoDoes it really have that much more of an influence than if Trump had just started a WordPress blog?
- Waterluvian 3y agoAbsolutely. The value is the engagement. Think of it as a comments section on steroids. Or maybe a “discussion room.”
- Hamuko 3y agoWordPress blogs also have comments sections. To me, the value of having a social media presence would be to boost your message beyond its core audience. However, Truth Social seems like it has a very selective group of people that would even sign up, so there's less of a chance of your posts being seen by someone who wasn't already interested in them. I'd imagine it'd be a lot cheaper to host too, and could probably still get around the same amount spent on advertising.
- Waterluvian 3y agoThe goal isn’t to use it to spread a message. It’s where the message is formed and the ideology is incubated. What was the point of a Klan rally?
- solardev 3y agoI think the point was that conservatives wanted to believe they had a legitimate grip on reality even though the mainstream social networks kept banning them. Having their own echo chamber safe space let them pretend they were on equal footing with the rest of the world. It's a veneer of legitimacy for an ideology that relies not on factualness but bravado...
- rchaud 3y agoEngagement only matters if an algorithm uses it to decide whether to display the tweet on non-follower feeds. On Twitter this wouod happen when politicos starting posting engagement-bait to get people on the other side to quote the tweet in order to dunk on it. Politicos didn't care because their posts were getting engagement, and spreading across the network. With Trump, there's no equivalent of that because it began life as politics platform and its audience reflects that; you'll see Trump messages whether you want to or not. That was not the case for Twitter.
- frumper 3y agoJust looking at his posts on TS today, it ranges from 200 to 1,000 comments. The comments are almost entirely memes that could easily be bots, many are not even friendly to Trump. These numbers sound neither impressive, nor worth losing any money over.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dbbk 3y agoFun fact, he already has one. https://www.donaldjtrump.com/news https://www.donaldjtrump.com/news
- jmyeet 3y agoWhatever engagement and reach Trump gets from Truth Social is a tiny fraction of what he would get for posting to Twitter. Don't forget he had what? Over 100 million followers? That would cost him nothing. Granted, TS was started when he was banned on Twitter but now? He could both save money and have more reach by shutting the whole thing down and going back to Twitter.
- mrtksn 3y agoThat's just one channel and he was deplatformed involuntarily - its not like he had a choice. Notice how he is still the strongest candidate, despite not having a mainstream platform. The indoctrination and content generated in his own platform, definitely spills to the mainstream. Truth Social must be invaluable for him. $73M is nothing next to the potential gains. Bloomberg spent much more that that and had nothing to show for it.
- rewmie 3y agoFrom the article: > In 2022, Truth Social posted a loss of $50 million, with net sales of just $1.4 million. It lost $23 million in the first half of this year, with net sales of $2.3 million. Does anyone have any insight on whether spending over $23 million to keep a social network afloat for six months is a reasonable operational cost? It seems a bit too pricey for the kind of operation it seems to be.
- sgt 3y agoWhen last did you look at your AWS bill?
- fs111 3y agoOne is allowed to rent servers elsewhere
- DonHopkins 3y agoLike Yandex Cloud.
- rewmie 3y agoI see what you did there.
- viraptor 3y agoI was just going to post that part. It's crazy considering they run a slightly modified mastodon backend and frontend. Sure, they needed some mobile devs to brand it (maybe contractors?) and some backend devs and ops (those would likely be permanent). But that still feels way off what they spend. For CDN they're using cloudflare, probably on enterprise pricing which would save them lots of money on image transfer. To be clear, this is only looking at the costs of running the platform itself. I don't know if they have a moderation team or spend lots on advertising.
- omarfarooq 3y agoEvery one in the 'value' chain at the organization is going to seek to maximally extract funds from it since management from the apex down has no competence to know proper budget and planning on a software product.
- 0xbadc0de5 3y agoSo doing better than Twitter?
- AnimalMuppet 3y agoTwitter's net loss may be higher, but I bet Twitter's revenue divided by cost is better.
- Oras 3y agoHow many active users does Truth social have?
- pjc50 3y agoA much smaller loss than Twitter! But I wonder who's paying for it. As a political campaign that seems within normal American amounts of spending.
- paraboul 3y agoA much smaller loss, how much loss per active user though?
- jwestbury 3y agoAbout $73m, I imagine?
- oefrha 3y ago$73m is less than 10% of Trump’s 2020 campaign spend. Depending on how many fans the platform managed to keep engaged, the cost could be worth it.
- sandworm101 3y ago>> Depending on how many fans the platform managed to keep engaged, I get the impression that most people on the platform, the silent majority, are not fans. It's the Howard Stern effect. People who hated him tuned into his show more than any actual fans.
- mc32 3y agoNo. Stern fans were the main audience. Some people who hated him did tune in, but those were a minority. Of course these days he’s turned more or less into Imus.
- roenxi 3y agoIf not for the Trump connection, it is hard to see a $73 million loss rating a headline. Musk lost more than that from share market fluctuations while buying Twitter. The obvious names that leap to my mind when it comes to losses are groups like Uber and WeWork who represent devastating capital misallocations of recent history. Tether, whenever it collapses, will also be one for the history books. Silicon Valley bank was nominally the biggest banking collapse in history IIRC. And if Trump is involved suddenly people want to try and take an interest in $73 million. It was a SPAC. Shock of all shocks the company is dodgy.
- DonHopkins 3y agoI wonder what the net loss of actual Truth is.
- mojo74 3y agoIf anyone here has a Truth Social account I would like them to Truth(?) this on their account and see what the reaction is. In particular I would be keen to see if the post then becomes shadow banned. I don't have an account but am interested in testing the waters on this considering nothing is off the table for Trump's fee speech platform. And we know how sensitive he is to questions about his business acumen.
- Etheryte 3y ago> fee speech platform That's such a great term, definitely stealing this one.
- TheAceOfHearts 3y agoThe Wikipedia article on Truth Social says that the Terms of Service used to include a clause which disallowed disparaging the service, although it was eventually removed. It wouldn't surprise me if posts which question the service would end up being censored or having their reach restricted.
- Lutger 3y agoIf its basically political advertisement its called a cost, not loss. But it helps to avoid tax I guess? Still sounds wasteful for what is basically a rebranded mastodon instance.
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 3y agoCosts translate to losses when they’re larger than revenues. And specifically, ads are not assets. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here and make our own accounting rules, ok?
- DonHopkins 3y ago"accounting rules"?!? We're talking about Trump, remember.
- PaywallBuster 3y agoThe filings: https://www.sec.gov/edgar/browse/?CIK=1849635&owner=exclude https://www.sec.gov/edgar/browse/?CIK=1849635&owner=exclude Specifically the quarterly one here mentioned: https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1849635/000119312523275473/d519123d10q.htm https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1849635/0001...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- shp0ngle 3y agois Truth Social the most popular Mastodon instance? Probably not, right edit: it seems there is 607,000 monthly users on Truth Social, Mastodon.social has 270,000 monthly users according to their own website. So Truth Social wins. But I am not sure how are Truth Social numbers accurate
- davidgerard 3y agoDoes Truth Social federate at all?
- Laaas 3y agoThey don't.
- shp0ngle 3y agoNo it doesn't, but it's technically a Mastodon instance.
- seanp2k2 3y agoOf course not; that wouldn’t align with the ideals of rugged individualism.
- kelseyfrog 3y agoSo it's an echo chamber?
- RGBCube 3y agoAs much as an echo chamber other big mastodon instances are, which all defederate quite quickly.
- Hamuko 3y agoPawoo had 800k users last December. https://masknetwork.medium.com/mask-network-acquires-pawoo-net-one-of-the-largest-mastodon-instances-5273504ba92d https://masknetwork.medium.com/mask-network-acquires-pawoo-n...
- TheAceOfHearts 3y agoThis article is surprisingly light on details, the Wikipedia article [0] has a bit more information about the service. What forms of revenue generation does Truth Social have? > In January 2023, the New York Times reported that, while Truth Social now carried advertising, it was limited to niche products, without the participation of major brands. It's not surprising that they're barely making any money if the only people willing to advertise on the platform are hardcore Trump supporters. There's no clear information on how many active users are on the platform. If Trump really wants to keep this service alive he can probably sell a subscription similar to the Blue Checkmark. Although it's possible that this would cannibalize part of his political donations. A few months back I found out that discoverability of Truth Social is also very poor. After hearing about some post I tried searching for it on DuckDuckGo and found out that they don't index the site at all. All the results were for news articles talking about the service. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_Social https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_Social
- netsharc 3y agoTheir robots.txt is blank.. I think previously they told non-US visitors to fuck off, but this might be a false memory..
- rchaud 3y agoWhy wouldn't you just search for the post on TS itself?
- TheAceOfHearts 3y agoI don't have an account and didn't want to make one. I'm not sure it's possible to search their service without an account.
- sschueller 3y agoIt can't possibly cost that much to operate a mediocre mastodon server with under a million monthly users? What are they spending all that money on?
- davedx 3y agoIt's a Trump enterprise, so probably whatever Trump wants to spend money on, judging by how his other companies are run. Edit: Attempt to answer unsarcastically (last 3 months): Regulatory settlement: $10,000,000 Legal investigations expense: $388,652 Franchise tax expense: $50,000 So the majority of their losses are (one time?) legal expenses. Whoah. For 6 months ended June 30, "Legal investigations expense" is $11M. Is Truth Social basically paying Trump's ongoing legal costs?
- Munksgaard 3y ago> Is Truth Social basically paying Trump's ongoing legal costs? Would that surprise anyone, Truth users included?
- Waterluvian 3y agoGiven Truth Social brought in something like 2.3M during that time, it’s more that their investors are paying his legal fees. I get to thinking, “who is stupid enough to be doing this?” And admittedly without any evidence, I then wonder if this is what “being funded by foreign interests” looks like.
- pjc50 3y agoThere's quite a large number of people who were close to Trump in his previous campaign who were convicted of offenses related to "unregistered foreign agents", around Manafort. This does not hurt his chances of re-election. At this point I think even a conviction wouldn't hurt him more than a fraction of a percent.
- lesuorac 3y agoIf Trump loses only a fraction of a percent in 2024 he still loses.
- passwordoops 3y agoNot bad! 10x that loss and Softbank might get interested /s
- aaron695 3y ago[dead]
- AniseAbyss 3y agoHas Trump ever run a business that made a profit that wasn't NYC real estate?
- gigatexal 3y agobut it doesn't matter right cuz he's a billionare, no?
- duckmysick 3y agoSomewhat related: I've been wondering how the other would-be Twitter challengers are doing? Namely Threads, Bluesky, Spoutible.
- MrThoughtful 3y agoIt is hard to say how many users federeated systems have. Bluesky is an interesting exception as so far there is only one server (bsky.app). According to Similarweb, bsky.app has 5 times more users than truthsocial.com
- RGBCube 3y ago> Bluesky is an interesting exception as so far there is only one server (bsky.app). According to Similarweb, bsky.app has 5 times more users than truthsocial.com Sources cited: bong
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- rchaud 3y agoOnly $2M in revenue? MyPillow.com CEO's legal bills must have really hollowed out their ads business.