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.
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.
The numbers were revealed in a new financial disclosure from TMTG’s SPAC merger partner Digital World Acquisition Corp.
The filing indicates that, if TMTG is unable to complete the merger with DWAC, and receive the pot of money on the line, it may not survive.
The amended S-4 filing also broke out a number of updates and risk factors related to the company, including the fact that the long-planned streaming video service appears to be off the table for now.
The filing makes no mention of the service (which was teased with conservative comedy specials and “Trump-specific programming”) except in relation to layoffs.
“This action followed a review of all departments, most significantly impacted TMTG’s streaming video on demand (SVOD) and infrastructure teams.”
In May of 2022, Trump agreed to make Truth Social his primary social platform, agreeing not to post on other platforms until 6 hours after he sends a “Truth.” However, since initially signing the deal with TMTG, Elon Musk acquired Twitter and reinstated Trump’s account (he also rebranded it as “X.”)
The original article contains 576 words, the summary contains 174 words. Saved 70%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
$73millions to manipulate your followers through unhinged tirades against your political enemies and destabilize a nations government - Putin says, "worth it!"