Gee, what a surprise! The Truth Social media deal is going bust – right before our eyes.
Yesterday the company filed a disclosure with the SEC covering its financial situation for the first half of this year and they have lost $23 million between January 1st and he end of June, on top of $50 million that they lost in 2022.
You can look at the actual filing right here, but where the document really gets interesting are pages 141 – 142, which illustrates one basic fact, namely, that nobody’s interested in advertising their goods and services on an internet venue owned by Donald Trump.
For all of 2022, the company racked up a whole, big revenue number of $1,369,000 and spent more than $24 million on operations and related costs.
For the first six months of this year, the company has upped its revenue to $2,226,000 and cut its costs to just under $9 million bucks. But in order to stay in business, the company also had to pay out more than $22 million this year in interest, which means their overall loss in 2023 is just shy of $23 million so far this year.
In other words, Trump’s attempt to cash in on his name in social media hasn’t worked. And the reason it hasn’t worked is very simple, namely, that what makes social media so popular is the extent to which users can trade content back and forth between themselves, whereas Trump’s platform is basically just about him.
Furthermore, and here’s the really big kicker, when it comes to entertainment, which is what social media delivers, politics just can’t compete with a video which shows a rodent snatching a candy bar off of a convenience store counter or a kitty cat coming out on a back porch and scaring a bear back into the woods.
Then there’s something else which is beginning to pinch Trump in the ass, which is that he’s hit a saturation point even with his loyal followers because he says the same thing every, single day.
Want to refer to the President of the United States as ‘crooked Joe?’ Fine. Do it once, do it twice, then let it go.
I happened to catch the noon news on CNN today, and in the space of 5 minutes Dana Bash talked about how Joe was helping to negotiate a release of the hostages held by Hamas at the same time that he was on his way for a meeting with Xi Jinping to announce a joint effort to restrict the sale of drugs used to make fentanyl and other addictive drugs.
Trump can’t really compete with that kind of content by posting a comment on a website which is losing more than $125 million every day. And even if the slavish Fake News repeats his social media comments as if they are news rather than what they are which is nothing more than stupid, self-serving remarks, the end of Truth Social is clearly in sight.
Until he was told to shut the fuck up and disappear, Trump got tremendous coverage on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook because - and here’s the really important point of my column today – these were already successful internet venues before Trump began using them to build his brand.
What Trump and his investors didn’t understand is that his name and his brand didn’t make Twitter and Facebook successful. It was the other way around!
As for the future of Trump and the internet, as Grandpa would say, ‘gai gezinta hai,’ (read: tough shit on you.)
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