Truth Social Had a Big IPO - Are the Downloads There to Back it Up?

Truth Social, Donald Trump's social network, went public this week. This is the second social media IPO in the last few weeks, and like the one before it, Truth Social's stock opened very strong!

But, is there real merit to the stock's behavior or is it just politics?

Let's have a look at downloads - the best indicator for current and potential growth.

So far, March has been one of Truth Social's best months for downloads. According to our estimates, Truth Social made its way into 397K iOS and Android devices in March (which won't be over for a few more days).

Truth Social saw 97K downloads in February and 93K in January, so March is pretty big.

But this isn't Trump's best month of downloads. Truth Social's best month of downloads was April of 2022, when the app wasn't even available on Google Play. Our estimates show there were 733K in April. Two other months got close, but most other months averaged 90K downloads.

Looking at the trend, Truth Social's growth is mainly flat until there's some event that causes a big spike in downloads.

Since rolling out in February of 2022, Truth Social was downloaded 6.6M times from the App Store and Google Play, according to our estimates.

One thing to note is that in most months, downloads from the App Store and Google Play are fairly even, which is usually a sign of paid user acquisition and not organic growth.

A look at our Search Ads Insights confirms Truth Social is advertising within the App Store. Truth Social is bidding on lots of keywords containing "truth", "twitter", and some competitor names across more than 4K keywords.

To answer my original question - I wouldn't call this trend amazing in any way. And I don't mean that in any political sense, just by purely looking at the numbers. And I'm not a financial advisor, but I don't expect the stock's price to align with demand for the app (for now, at least).