Comment Former President Donald Trump’s Truth Social website is facing financial challenges as traffic remains weak and the company that is set to acquire it fears its legal troubles could lead to a decline in popularity. Six months after its high-profile launch, the site — a Twitter clone, which banned Trump after Jan. 6, 2021 — still has no guaranteed source of revenue and a questionable path to growth, according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings from Digital World Acquisition, the company that plans to take Trump’s start-up, the Trump Media & Technology Group, public. The company warned this week that its business could be damaged if Trump “becomes less popular or there are further controversies that damage his credibility.” The company has seen its share price sink nearly 75% since its peak in March and said in a filing last week that it had lost $6.5 million in the first half of the year. The FBI investigation into Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida estate, has sparked a flurry of Truth Social user activity, and Trump himself is increasingly using the site as one of his main online mouthpieces. “WE GAVE THEM A LOT,” he said, or “true,” on Friday in reaction to an FBI affidavit about classified documents kept at his Palm Beach home. The FBI operative was a prolific contributor to Trump’s Truth Social website There are signs that the company’s financial base is beginning to erode. The Trump Organization stopped paying RightForge, a conservative web hosting service, in March and now owes it more than $1 million, according to Fox Business, which first reported the dispute. The company has also struggled with some key elements of corporate operation. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office this month rejected its application to trademark “Truth Social,” citing “likelihood of confusion” with other companies with a similar brand, including an app, “VERO — True Social,” that first released in 2015. Representatives for Trump’s company and Digital World did not respond to requests for comment. RightForge has been touted as a pillar of the conservative push to build a parallel Internet protected from “big tech censorship.” Its chief executive Martin Avila declined to comment and said: “We fully support the president and his efforts.” But two people with knowledge of the dispute, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss personal details, said the lack of payment had fueled anger that Trump could undermine a champion of his “free speech ». The Trump company and RightForge have been communicating with each other exclusively through lawyers in recent weeks, the people said. Digital World Acquisition’s stock fell about 7% on Friday. Trump’s Truth Social is in trouble as financial, technical problems mount Trump’s businesses have faced many similar payment battles over the years. In previous SEC filings, Digital World also noted that “a number of companies associated with [Trump] have filed for bankruptcy” and that “there can be no assurances that [Trump’s media company] it won’t go bankrupt either.” In fact, Digital World filings have been consistently low on Truth Social’s likelihood of success. Trump’s company “can never generate operating income or ever achieve profitable operations,” he said in May, and if it “fails to address [its] risks, her business will probably fail.” In June, Digital World said it had been subpoenaed by a federal grand jury and faced investigations by both the Justice Department and the SEC that could delay its merger with Trump’s company. The deal, originally planned for this year, has now been frozen indefinitely. Digital World also said in the filings that Trump’s social network will need millions of people to “regularly use” it for the site to achieve commercial success. But Trump, the site’s most popular user, has fewer than 4 million followers, and the site’s most actively trending topics, including #DefundTheFBI, have seen only a few thousand people posting on them in recent days, according to data from the website. By comparison, Twitter says it has about 37 million people in the US actively using the site every day. Pro-Trump influencers flock to alternative social networks. Their follower count stopped soon after. Truth Social has become a common sounding board for pro-Trump debate and outrage. A gunman killed after failing to break into an FBI office in Cincinnati was a frequent user of Truth Social, urging followers in posts to “kill” FBI agents “on sight,” according to a profile matching the name, the location of the suspect. and photo. But in the days since the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago investigation, Truth Social’s viewership has slowed, according to traffic estimates from Similarweb, an online analytics firm. Its US audience has dropped to about 300,000 views a day, from nearly 1.5 million on its release day. While the site’s reputation suffered after its launch in February was marred by fake accounts, a long waiting list and other technical glitches, that time also marked the peak of the site’s online popularity, estimates show. Trump is facing Justice Department investigations into his role in the January 6 riots at the US Capitol and his handling of classified documents after losing the presidency. Political investigators in New York are digging into the Trump Organization, the longtime real estate firm and licensing. Trump supporters were quick to debunk the January 6 testimony. Then they got confused. Even his hiring of former Republican congressman Devin Nunes, a staunch Trump ally, to be the company’s CEO is facing scrutiny. Judge William Matthewman in West Palm Beach ruled earlier this month that Trump Media must provide information about Nunes’ employment to Hearst Media magazine and reporter Ryan Lizza, whom Nunes has sued for defamation. Nunes, who took over in January, currently earns $750,000 a year and is slated to raise that to $1 million after two years, according to Digital World filings.
