Sensor Tower says that this would-be Twitter killer has attracted only 1.2 Million installations.
Former president Donald Trump’s Truth Social app is seeing a 93% drop in signups and similarly steep decline in traffic after a rocky rollout last month fraught with technical issues and an extensive waiting list for new signups to actually use the service.
After going live on President’s Day, the Twitter-lookalike app saw installs decline by more than 800,000 since its launch week, according to Sensor Tower. Based on early estimates, the Apple app store has seen a drop in installs to around 60,000 per week this month.
“This is down 93% from its launch week, when it saw 872,000 installs during the week of Feb. 21,”Stephanie Chan, mobile insights strategist for Sensor Tower, said that. “We estimate that Truth Social has so far reached approximately 1.2 million installs since its launch.”
There isn’t any data available on how many people actually use the site. This information is not available for Android users.
Truth Social, its desktop website, has seen a significant drop in traffic after the launch. Similarweb reports that Truthsocial.com had 6 million visits the week prior to February 20th, but has fallen to about 1.9million weekly visits over recent weeks. App store download page visits have also dropped from 361,000 visits during launch week, to around 90,000. Weekly visits last week.
Truth Social’s rep did not respond when we asked for comments.
Even with Trump as the platform’s face, the app is not able to compete in an already saturated social media market. Many apps have risen to prominence as alternatives for Big Tech platforms like Twitter and Facebook. This has attracted criticism from Trump and others.
Former Trump aide Jason Miller’s Twitter clone Gettr has reached some 1.9 million daily users with 6.7 million global installs, while Parler has about 11.3 million global installs, according to Sensor Tower. Trump has not joined Gettr.
“Creating your own social network is not an easy thing to do,”David Carr, senior insights manager at Similarweb said. “You have to be significantly better and more interesting.”
Carr observed that the initial interest in Truth Social waned quickly. “It did mirror the pattern we have seen before when Trump tried a couple of other things, [showing a] spike in interest and then going away quickly,” he said, referring to Trump’s past projects that include his now defunct blog.
Truth and its competitors mostly target a conservative audience, touting a social network that defends freedom of speech over Big Tech’s censorship after Trump himself was suspended from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and a handful of other social media apps last year for violating their content policies.
The demographics for Truth’s site initially showed nearly half (47%) of visitors in January came from outside the U.S., with the majority (70%) of them male, according to Similarweb.
Carr said that traffic was slowing down due to initial signup problems and download issues. The app is still being downloaded by users who are waiting to be added to the waitlist. Although the app is advertised as “The App for Everyone”, it has not been updated. “the place where you could engage with your favorite ex president,”Carr said: “it turned out there wasn’t much for them to do there.”
Some people are still wondering why the ex-president hasn’t posted anything on his social network even after one month.