• skulblaka@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • bdonvr@thelemmy.club
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • buddhabound@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • Imgonnatrythis
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      1 year ago

      Agree this math adds up like it was done by Trumps property appraisers.

      • grabyourmotherskeys@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.