According to rather damning reporting from the New York Times, Donald Trump’s Truth Social, Twitter-replacement social media platform is really struggling these days, as major advertisers avoid the platform like the plague, leaving Trump’s company to resort to what the Times describes as “miracle cures, scams, and fake merchandise,” in a desperate effort to keep its head above water and merely survive.
To make matters that much worse for the washed-up former guy, the scammy, schticky nature of Truth Social has left the MAGA-devout users of the platform frustrated and fed up with the constant stream of bull they’re subjected to, if they want to use the former guy’s platform, where he now makes all of his official “statements” and daily whines.
Apparently, the situation has gotten so bad, it’s left Truth Social users to take to the comment sections on the platform and lodge complaints at the former president for allowing the platform to turn into nothing more than a cesspool of scams and bullshit.
But, as the Times notes, the big guy doesn’t really have a choice, if he wants to keep the doors of Truth Social open.
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According to the report, Trump’s Twitter dupe social media site is all but completely devoid of any advertising from large, notable, reputable advertising companies. There are a lot of reasons for ad companies’ decisions to steer clear of Truth Social, ranging from the hateful, dangerous rhetoric you’ll find there, to the lack of users of the site overall, to the simple fact that the demographic you will find on Trump’s Truth Social isn’t the people that ad companies look to target with their content.
The Times’ Stuart Thompson writes:
Ads from major brands are nonexistent on the site. Instead, the ads on Truth Social are for alternative medicine, diet pills, gun accessories and Trump-themed trinkets, according to an analysis of hundreds of ads on the social network by The New York Times. The ads reflect the difficulty that several far-right platforms, including Rumble and Gab, have faced in courting large brands, preventing the sites from tapping into some of the world’s largest ad budgets.”
The publication notes that Trump’s funding for his Truth Social adventure came almost entirely from donations made by GOP donors, totaling somewhere around $37 million. The platform is estimated to be burning through a whopping $1.7 million per month just to stay up and running, and the lack of any additional money coming in, coupled with growing issues with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Truth Social is running out of cash… Fast.
Former GOP Congressman turned chief executive of Trump Media, Devin Nunes, tried with all his might to speak it into existence when he announced that major advertisers would be tripping over each other in an effort to flock to the former president’s social media site. But clearly, that has not been the case, and Truth Social has instead been left to essentially take what they can get from small, less favorable, and frankly unsavory companies and their scam-filled ads.
Even worse still, is the recent revelation from one advertiser, who admitted that the money he has spent on ads on Trump’s social media platform has gotten him absolutely nowhere fast, in terms of making any sales from the ads.
“Maxwell Finn, an online marketer, said in a YouTube video that he was one of Truth Social’s top advertisers, spending more than $150,000 on ads, including those for Trump-themed hats, shirts, coins, and novelty bills. In the video, he called the ad platform ‘frustrating’ and ‘bare bones,’ adding that it lacked even basic functionality, forcing his company to manually track ad performance — a method that would prove impossible for advertisers with larger budgets,” the Times reports, with Finn further explaining, “Do I think this is a platform where you can be spending tens of thousands of dollars a day, especially if you only have a few products? No, probably. The audience is just too small.”
There are still a handful of advertisers that remain on the former president’s platform, but it seems they’re quickly serving to drive away the site’s users, who are frustrated and furious that the companies and the content of their ads apparently aren’t being vetted whatsoever, before getting slapped from corner to corner of the site.
“Over time, the low-quality ads on Truth Social have irritated its own users, who have complained to Mr. Trump after repeatedly seeing the same disturbing images or after falling for misleading gimmicks,” NYT reports, including one example of a fuming comment left from a user complaining directly to the former president, “Can you not vet the ads on Truth? I’ve been scammed more than once.”
Read the full report from the New York Times here.
Featured image via screen capture
