Nearly two and a half years after its launch, Truth Social is struggling to retain its small U.S. user base, according to new data from the microblogging platform launched by former President Donald Trump’s media company.
Daily visits to Truth Social in the U.S. so far in May are down more than 21% compared to April and down more than 35% compared to March, according to digital intelligence platform Similarweb.
The average number of monthly visits to the site last year – just over 4 million from May 2023 to April 2024 – fell more than 39% compared to the previous 12-month period, from May 2022 to April 2023, reported Similarweb.
Traffic is down, even though Trump — Truth Social’s most prominent user and majority shareholder of its parent company — Trump media — has saturated the national news with coverage of his criminal trial and bid for the White House.
And while the app saw a surge in visitors leading up to Trump Media’s stock market debut in March, the latest data from Similarweb shows those gains have already been wiped out.
User and engagement data collected and analyzed exclusively for CNBC by Similarweb and two other data firms offers a glimpse into the evolution of Trump Media’s flagship product – a glimpse that the company itself has not yet provided.
The company claims that it does not track key indicators that social media platforms traditionally use to monitor their performance. This includes metrics such as a website’s active user accounts and its daily and monthly visitor numbers, as well as revenue per user and ad impressions.
According to its recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Trump Media believes that pursuing these statistics “may not be in the best interest” of the company or its shareholders.
The company also said it “may never collect, monitor or report certain key operating metrics.”
CNBC reached out to Trump Media for comment on the companies’ findings and asked if the company could provide its own data.
“Why should we comment on a fake news network that reports on fake analyses?” The company said this through a spokesman.
But the new analyzes could be warning signs for Trump Media, whose business depends in large part on the growth of its user base.
“If you can’t demonstrate that you have a large, active, engaged and growing audience, I don’t understand how you build a successful ad-supported social media business,” said David Carr, editor of insights, news and research at Similarweb , in an interview.
Trump Media relies entirely on advertising sales for its revenue and discloses in its SEC filings that a decline in user engagement could harm its business by making Truth Social less attractive to advertisers.
The data firms’ findings could also reinforce Wall Street analysts’ view of the company as a “meme stock” whose skyrocketing market capitalization is untethered to its business fundamentals.
“We fundamentally see nothing in these digital indicators that would explain why the valuation is so high,” Carr said.
Trump Media on Tuesday reported a first-quarter net loss of nearly $328 million on revenue of about $771,000, most of which came from advertising.
Still, the company had a market cap of just over $8 billion as of Friday.
The stock closed Friday at $45.81 per share, which is about the middle of the broad stock price range, which runs from a low of about $22 per share to a high of about $70 which TMTG shares have been trading since the company’s IPO in March.
A single climb
Truth Social’s monthly active user numbers fell significantly in the U.S. in the final months of 2023, three different data firms told CNBC.
But traffic on the platform rebounded in the first quarter of this year when Trump Media struck a deal that allowed the company to trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol DJT.
Similarweb counted 781,954 active iOS and Android users on Truth Social in the U.S. this month, an increase of more than 58% from February. GWS Magnify provided an even rosier analysis, calculating that Truth Social’s monthly user numbers reached a new high of 1.4 million in March, continuing into April.
News of Trump Media & Technology Group’s public trading is shown on television screens at the Nasdaq Marketplace in New York City on March 26, 2024.
Michael M. Santiago | Getty Images
Meanwhile, data firm Sensor Tower has calculated that the social media platform’s monthly active users in the US increased 10% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2024.
However, all three analysts attributed this increase to strong press coverage of Trump Media’s public merger and the highly volatile start to trading, which saw the stock jump as much as 50%.
It seems unlikely that this meme-fueled madness will result in a long-term increase in traffic: In the four weeks ended May 19, for example, Truth Social’s daily active users in the U.S. fell by 19, year-over-year, according to Similarweb. 7% back.
The Headwinds of Truth Social
According to GWS Magnify, Truth Social also faces two major obstacles in building an engaged user base.
The first is a storage problem. Truth Social users visit the site less than two days per week on average, lagging behind apps like Facebook, X, TikTok, Reddit and Pinterest.
Truth Social users also experience fewer minutes of interaction on the platform than users of other social media networks. The vast majority of Truth Social users, 87%, also use Facebook. Another 51% are also on X, GWS Magnify reported.
“Compared to other social media platforms, Truth Social users access the app much less often and spend much less time on it per session,” said the company’s CEO, Dr. Paul Carter, in an email to CNBC.
“This will have a greater impact on Truth’s prospects than any media spotlight,” Carter said.
Former US President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally in the South Bronx in New York City on May 23, 2024.
Jim Watson | AFP | Getty Images
He added that any future decline in Truth Social’s numbers “will be due to the platform’s failure to engage users in the way that the most successful social media companies – most notably TikTok – have mastered have.”
The second problem is that Truth Social offers nothing that sets it apart from larger microblogging sites, particularly X, which it closely resembles.
According to its latest earnings report, Trump Media is focused on adding new features to Truth Social, including live TV streaming.
Truth Social’s most unique feature right now is Trump himself, who uses the app regularly and occasionally shares updates in his posts.
But Trump’s presence on Truth Social alone wasn’t enough to distract users from his competitors, nor was the nationwide press coverage of Trump’s criminal trial and his campaign to defeat President Joe Biden.
“It just didn’t happen,” Carr said.
— Rob Wile of NBC News and Gabriel Cortes of CNBC contributed to this report.
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2024-05-24 22:36:27
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