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Despite the fact that it was founded by the president-elect, Truth Social is still somewhat of a niche social network. Perhaps due to Donald Trump's re-election, it saw some pickup in November, but it saw its gains crushed by rival upstart Bluesky.
Per right-wing media aggregate The Righting, which cites Comscore data, Trump's Truth Social saw "significant year-over-year (YOY) growth in unique visitors" in November, pulling in 4.25 million unique visitors compared to just over 3 million in November 2023.
However, Bluesky attracted about 5.35 million unique visitors in November, "a massive YOY change of 1,048%." It too benefited from Trump's re-election, as more liberal-leaning X users defected to Bluesky in protest of X owner Elon Musk's public backing of Trump in addition to increasingly lax content moderation on the site.
"Bluesky’s huge year-over-year growth is not surprising because the platform only opened registrations to the general public in February 2024," said Howard Polskin, president of The Righting. "However, in a short period of time, Bluesky is already attracting more monthly unique visitors than Truth Social which launched to the public in February 2022 and has benefited greatly by Mr. Trump’s constant use of his platform."
The Righting also notes a 1% year-over-year gain for right-leaning YouTube alternative Rumble with just over 6 million unique visitors and a 92% bump for Gettr, though it only has 215,000 uniques.
Some X users, meanwhile, also made the leap to Threads, which dwarfs both Truth Social and Bluesky thanks to the reach of its parent company, Meta. Threads added 15 million new users in the first two weeks of November alone, averaging over 1 million new signups per day for its third consecutive month.
The Righting also notes a general downward trend of traditional right-wing media consumption based on numbers from 2020. Though FoxNews.com was up 18% in November year-over-year, its 92,000 unique visitors were a 29% drop from November 2020. The biggest right-wing losers between 2020 and 2024 were Breitbart, Townhall, and The Federalist, which lost over 90% of their respective traffic.
CNN, The New York Times, and The Washington Post also saw big drops in unique visitors in the last four years, though they all recorded gains between November 2023 and 2024.
“The sagging traffic numbers for right wing and mainstream outlets represent another concerning sign of major audience erosion for traditional news platforms,” said Polskin.