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.
Almost $80,000 per daily user?
They do have a unique level of access to a userbase that will believe absolutely anything you tell them.
“Here’s a piece of paper that says you own gold. That will be $2,000.”
“Here’s a piece of paper that says you own gold."
Bank notes?
Geoffrey dollars
Not since we’ve gone to a debt-backed fiat.
Imagine if Facebook or Google tried to sell investors on that sort of nonsense…
Facebook would be worth what disguy_ovahea says below, I’m bad at math
Facebook has 2.9B users. That would be $232T or $232,000,000,000,000.
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But you have to understand that this is the crème of the crème of society.
Only the best people
And it is just a fork of Mastodon. Wall Street is fucked up.
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,
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.
And also somehow have huge expenditures
Is this a euphemism for money laundering?
It was created to launder foreign money.
Or are they considered political megaphone parrots, hence a valuable userbase?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Add to it that Truth Social is actually running on Mastodon software.
Why is it valued so high to investors if the company makes almost no revenue? 9 billion ? What the fuck?
Money laundering
Let’s say you’re an organization (or foreign actor) who wants to get as many no-strings-attached dollars into Trump’s hands as possible. You can’t do that through campaign donations because those are watched way too closely. You can’t just cut him a check, because that looks suspicious too. What you can do however is buy stock in the company he mostly owns, and inflate the stock price as much as you want.
Which explains why it was standard procedure for presidents to put their money in a blind trust. And why Trump didn’t.
That is one hell of a theory. Not sure how you would even stop it.
You can stop it by enforcing the Emoulents Clause, and forcing Presidents to disclose all of their finances, and prove they are not taking money from any Foreign government. But Conservatives are very selective about which parts of the Constitution are worth upholding.
I really really hope a journalist somewhere is investigating the individuals and shell companies that purchase Truth Social stock, because I would bet that this is happening.
Russia in particular would find it useful because even if it’s done with plausible deniability, it’s another secret that, upon being revealed, would cause major problems for Trump. That is enough to function as leverage.
How many of those 113,000 are just reporters waiting for Drumph’s next manufactured controversy to report on? Can they please just stop regurgitating every stupid thing he spouts?
Yeah also why the hell do they show up at the courthouse every single day after the trial and let him spew his lies? They don’t do that for other people on trial they just report what happened. Why does he get to make it a campaign speech?
I commented on a Reddit post that rddt is worth less than djt currently. I hypothesized that awful moderation was worse than no moderation.
Mod banned me lol.
Well, you were technically wrong, there are more shares of RDDT than DJT, so even though RDDT is cheaper per-share than DJT after yesterday’s close, RDDT’s total market cap is about $1B higher.
Still no reason for a ban. Now that RDDT is publically traded and has a much higher profile, I wonder if some enterprising lawyer can figure out a class action lawsuit against Reddit for all the people who were banned from the site for bullshit reasons. You’d probably have to prove some actual harm, though. Most Reddit bans only hurt your pride.
Let it die
Didn’t his auditor just get blacklisted for life?
Got to hand it to this guy. He pulled billions of dollars out of a hat. And just when things were starting to look pretty bad.
Now he can basically afford to pay his way out of any penalty. Must be nice to be able to do that.
He was bailed out, again.
He was already bankrupt before running for presidency and Russia bailed him out.
Now he is being bailed out by China.
Running out of money to pay for bots
Why would they stay on it when they can go back to Twitter now?
Can they, really?
Are you allowed to say the N-word on twitter?
I thought mr free speech allows that
Where were all of those 71 million voters? Was 113k all that they could get of them?
You’re saying that people who vote for him should create accounts? I mean, I don’t think that that is all that surprising. I might vote for Biden over Trump because I prefer him as a president, but if Biden starts a social media company, I’m probably not gonna go move my social media activity there.
Good point. But Biden voters also rarely if ever worship Biden like some kind of deity. Trump voters on the other hand…
What’s sad about images like these are really people broken by politics because they can’t wrap their heads around what’s going on.
They’re victims of hysteria; casualties of consciousness.
Reverse vulcan on the hand, good choice.
“die young and poor”
Is truth social bigger than lemmy?
Probably, to be honest. Though of course that doesn’t speak to the quality of its content.
Wouldn’t comparing it to Mastodon make more sense? And yes Mastodon is bigger and TS is even based on their server.
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