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I find it hard to believe that a website the size of Truth Social (i.e. pretty small.... They have a total of 2 million users, a generous 15% of them might be active. It isn't Twitter) managed to rack up $73 million in costs over a single year of operation.
I see two possibilities. Either whoever is hosting them is charging them a stupendously exorbitant amount of money to keep their website online, because they hate them or because they know they have Trump & Co in a vise and can charge whatever they want; or else a lot of "operating costs" look like the inside of various pockets. Perhaps both. Probably both, now that I think about it, though I suspect the latter quite a bit more.
I run an instance of Lemmy with 300 users and it costs me about $223 per year.
They have 6000x more users. So it should cost them about..... $1.5m
(Of course I know that's completely unrealistic and things don't scale like that. Just a fun exercise.)
But yeah that's way too much for a site that only serves 2 million people.
It's easy to do if it's a grift for paying kickbacks by paying well over market rate for services that you can pad the numbers on easily.
Agree this math adds up like it was done by Trumps property appraisers.
There are a number of details in the article which explain where the money went. Did you read it?
There is nothing explaining expenditures at all. They state they downsized and eliminated development of VOD. They also said they probably cannot secure additional financing.
I don't find it that hard to believe they burned through that cash. It's a lot of money but they probably signed massive deals with overpriced, incompetent consultants that subcontracted to overpriced, incompetent outsourcing.
They probably also went nuts on infrastructure again through a few layers of b.s., each of which took a cut.
Anyone who thought a site like this was going to be profitable in first few years, or really ever, is nuts. I mean the man ran a casino into the ground.