Trump’s Truth Social App Plummets in Traffic, Sees 93% Drop in Signups Since Launch Week (Exclusive)

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. Installs on the Apple app store this month have fallen to about 60,000 per week, based on early estimates.

“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 at Sensor Tower, told TheWrap. “We estimate that Truth Social has so far reached approximately 1.2 million installs since its launch.”

And there is no data about how many actually use the site, which is not yet available to Android customers.

On its desktop site, Truth Social has also seen a significant decline in traffic following the launch period. Truthsocial.com spiked to 6 million visits during the week of Feb. 20 but has dropped to around 1.9 million weekly visits in recent weeks, according to Similarweb. The app store download page visits also declined from 361,000 visits during launch week to some 90,000 weekly visits last week.

A rep for Truth Social did not respond to a request for comment.

Even having Trump as the face of the platform, the app is struggling to compete in a saturated social media market. Many apps have entered the scene as alternatives to Big Tech platforms like Facebook and Twitter that have drawn ire from Trump and other conservatives.

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 noted that the initial burst of interest in Truth Social dissipated very 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 explained that the initial signup errors and download issues also likely contributed to the slowdown in traffic. Users are still downloading the app only to get waitlisted. Despite being billed as “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.”

Meanwhile, some are still questioning why the former president has yet to post anything on his own social network after a month of operation.