The funniest thing about Truth Social is that it’s a fork of Mastodon.
Mastodon.world cost $1200 to run last month. And running it was hobby-level effort by a guy who admins lemmy.world AND has a proper day job and family.
They’re selling ads and have a couple web devs to tweak their version of Mastodon, and they can’t even pull in enough ad revenue to make that work. 😆
But how does Mastadon embezzle millions from their product and only have a cost of $1200? Thats impossible, I don’t see any of them hiring shitty football players to be assistants so they must be doing something wrong.
How the hell is M.World costing $1200 a month ! ? Its not that heavy on activity. Uni or Mastodonapp.uk probably has more and costs less to run. I mean I run cupoftea.social with 5000 users at £80 a month.
The $1200 is for both mastodon.world and lemmy.world combined, but yeah. Most of it (80%) is going towards Hetzner, which is their cloud storage/hosting provider.
Serious question, because I refuse to even subject my eyeballs to that dime-store-knockoff: Is anyone besides Trump himself actually posting on there?
All I ever see is his own drivel. I’ve posted youtube videos with more likes. I’ve never seen anyone not named Trump even post there.
How is a site that exclusively caters to the stream of consciousness of exactly one person supposed to make money? Especially when that stream of consciousness is going to be covered by every major network anyway? Even if you’re a die-hard MAGA supporter, there’s literally no reason to go onto the site. Just watch Newsmax. They’ll cover it anyway.
It baffles me that he even got funding for this. I don’t care what people think of his politics; there was never a scenario where this business model was ever going to work.
I’ve never been on there, but I am inclined to think that there is at least a small group of die hards that post there. I have seen quotes from other posters on there on various news articles. Interestingly, Joe Biden (or at least his campaign staffers) now have a presence on there which I find hysterical. I think that’s basically tantamount to trying to convert the Pope to pastafarianism but maybe a few people over there haven’t had their brains fall out completely (not that Biden is the ideal president but he’s far better than Trump).
management has substantial doubt that TMTG will have sufficient funds to meet its liabilities as they fall due, including liabilities related to promissory notes previously issued by TMTG
i hear another Trump Bankruptcy Train 'a comin down the tracks wooo woooo
$73millions to manipulate your followers through unhinged tirades against your political enemies and destabilize a nations government - Putin says, “worth it!”
Clone Twitter, a famously unprofitable business, then remove cool celebrities and fill it with Nazis, misogynists, and other people that advertisers and their customers hate.
Since launching in early 2022, former President Donald Trump‘s Truth Social took in $3.7 million in net sales, and lost $73 million.
The loss is, presumably, the amount of money they spent that year in operating costs, etc.
In business, a loss is when a company’s expenditures are more than its income. It’s not like the money is “lost” as in “missing” or “lost in a bet” at a casino. Truth Social spent more money than it made in 2022, which means they operated at a loss for 2022.
I find it hard to believe that a website the size of Truth Social (i.e. pretty small.... They have a total of 2 million users, a generous 15% of them might be active. It isn't Twitter) managed to rack up $73 million in costs over a single year of operation.
I see two possibilities. Either whoever is hosting them is charging them a stupendously exorbitant amount of money to keep their website online, because they hate them or because they know they have Trump & Co in a vise and can charge whatever they want; or else a lot of "operating costs" look like the inside of various pockets. Perhaps both. Probably both, now that I think about it, though I suspect the latter quite a bit more.
There is nothing explaining expenditures at all. They state they downsized and eliminated development of VOD. They also said they probably cannot secure additional financing.
I don’t find it that hard to believe they burned through that cash. It’s a lot of money but they probably signed massive deals with overpriced, incompetent consultants that subcontracted to overpriced, incompetent outsourcing.
They probably also went nuts on infrastructure again through a few layers of b.s., each of which took a cut.
Anyone who thought a site like this was going to be profitable in first few years, or really ever, is nuts. I mean the man ran a casino into the ground.
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