President Donald Trump's social media website has a bad case of the summertime blues — and the controversial offer of early access to his posts doesn't appear to be the cure.
Online traffic to Trump's Truth Social platform plummeted about 36 percent last month, even as larger rivals saw their numbers of users grow, according to a report Monday.
The site also suffered a slightly larger dip in users during June, The New York Times said, citing figures compiled by the Similarweb digital data company.
Howard Polskin, founder of TheRighting, which covers conservative media, told the Times he'd been tracking Truth Social's traffic numbers "for years" and was "really struck by the steepness of the plunge."
“When you think of how much Trump uses Truth Social as a megaphone you would think the numbers would be skyrocketing,” Polskin said.
Despite the situation at Truth Social, competitors including X, owned by Trump supporter and world's richest person Elon Musk, and Threads, owned by Facebook parent company Meta, have experienced increased traffic this summer, according to the Times.
The White House referred an inquiry from The Independent to Truth Social's publicly traded parent company, Trump Media & Technology Group, which didn't immediately respond.
The Times said a Truth Social spokesperson declined to comment on the site's traffic numbers.
The sharp drop in traffic to Truth Social comes as Trump Media has been selling subscriptions to Truth API — which provides near-instantaneous alerts to Trump's social media posts — at a cost of up to $100,000 a month.
Critics, including Democratic lawmakers, allege that the subscriptions enable insider trading because Trump's posts on subjects including tariffs and his Iran war can move markets.
“If this was the CEO of a public company, this would be jail time,” Irene Aldridge, head of the Able Alpha Trading investment company, told The Associated Press earlier this month. "We have a President of the United States who has the front seat to all the action, who makes all the decisions, and he’s disclosing this ahead of time to a select group.”
The Truth Social spokesperson told the Times that congressional Democrats “continue to mischaracterize” the subscriptions “either out of ideological opposition to free markets or a failure to grasp the distinction between public and nonpublic information.”
Trump is the biggest shareholder in Trump Media, but he doesn't hold a formal position with the company. His eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., sits on its board and oversees a trust that controls his dad's nearly 115 million shares.
The president's stake is valued at about $1.1 billion, although its stock price has fallen about 80 percent since the company went public in March 2024, according to the Times.
The struggling company has also reported steep operating losses every quarter since then, including a net loss of $406 million against $871,000 in revenue, mostly from ads on Truth Social, during this year's first quarter, the Times said.
In April, it ousted CEO Devin Nunes, formerly a Republican House member from California, replacing him with former Hulu executive Kevin McGurn as it seeks to merge with nuclear fusion power company TAE Technologies in an all-stock deal valued at more than $6 billion.
