Donald Trump’s social network Truth Social lost a staggering $58 million in 2023, with SEC filings showing Monday that the website and app, which went public last week, lost momentum as the year went on.
Trump Media said it generated just $751,000 in advertising revenue in Q4, an over 25 percent decrease from the more than $1 million it pulled in the previous quarter. The filings list advertising revenue from Truth as Trump Media’s only revenue stream.
They revealed that most of Truth’s expenses are tied to debt. The company sought a cash infusion by going public last week, calling on those with fat pockets to invest in the network that’s dominated by Trump’s daily, often all-caps rants. It listed its valuation last week as being more than $8 billion, of which Trump owns about $4.6 billion.
Experts have noted that an investment in Truth Social, which trades under its parent company Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), is essentially an in-kind donation to Trump himself. The share price of the company, which uses the stock ticker DJT for Trump’s initials, plunged 15 percent after Monday morning’s filing—a dip that shaved off millions from the company’s market value.
In an SEC filing, TMTG issued warnings for potential investors. Notably, it listed Trump’s growing legal troubles, including the $500 million he’s on the hook for in a recent civil verdict.
It also noted his pending criminal cases, his history of running businesses into bankruptcy, and the fact that Trump could flee his own social network for another at any given moment—a move that’d possibly kill off Truth Social entirely.
“The death, incarceration, or incapacity of President Trump, or discontinuation or limitation of his relationship with TMTG, may negatively impact TMTG’s business,” the company wrote.
Trump launched Truth Social on Feb. 21, 2022, about a year after major social networks banned him from their platforms for his role in allegedly inciting the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.
While Trump promised to put a significant dent in his competitors’ user base, it doesn’t appear to have gained serious steam as a major social network. A change may need to happen fast if Truth is to survive, with the company writing in SEC filings it’d need “millions” of users to sign up and “regularly use” the network for it to be successful.
The company behind Truth Social doesn’t disclose its user numbers, but SimilarWeb estimates it had roughly 1 million active users in February.
By comparison, Twitter, now X, generated roughly $5.2 billion in the final year before Elon Musk’s takeover. Multiple outlets have reported X still has over 300 million active users.
The first day of Truth Social’s public trading, on Tuesday, appears to have been its busiest day of traffic in March. SimilarWeb estimated it had 277,000 U.S. visitors on Tuesday—a far cry from the 32 million U.S. visitors who logged on that same day to Reddit, a competitor who recently went public and trades at a lower stock price than TMTG.
In SEC filings, TMTG noted that its user base is comprised almost entirely of Republicans, citing polls from 2022 about who’d actually sign up and use the website. TMTG insinuated there’s a risk that those using Truth Social could migrate back to X should Trump do the same or find himself behind bars, conceding that its majority-owner is “the subject of numerous legal proceedings, the scope and scale of which are unprecedented for a former President of the United States.”
Trump did not immediately address the latest filings on Monday morning.
This post was originally published on Daily Beast
