After former President Donald J. Trump was kicked off Twitter in 2021, conservative entrepreneurs rushed to promote social media alternatives tailored to him and his supporters.
There were Parler and Gab, Twitter-like sites popular among the people who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Then came Gettr, a social media app created by one of Mr. Trump’s former advisers.
That crowded field has now narrowed, giving an edge to Truth Social, the platform that Mr. Trump’s company owns and where he is the main attraction.
In March, Truth Social recorded 1.5 million unique visitors in the United States as its parent company started trading on the public markets, up 130 percent from the previous month, according to Similarweb, a data firm that tracks web traffic. While the app’s visitor count was minuscule compared with mainstream social sites, it was 13 times the size of the combined total recorded by Parler and Gettr.
Truth Social’s closest competitor was Gab, a hotbed for antisemitic and racist posts, which drew 246,000 unique visitors in March, according to Similarweb. (Andrew Torba, Gab’s founder, disputed that figure, saying Gab had about 6.5 million unique visitors in March, but his numbers couldn’t be independently verified.)
