Aspiring TikTok competitors has supposedly been said to inflate the numbers of its monthly active users. Triller is an app for short videos that have caught the interest of a bunch of TikTok stars among which is Charli D’Amelio, the platform’s most popular person.
Business Insider reports that Triller announced to the public that it had over 100 million active users last month.
However, six of the company’s previous employees stand to disagree with the numbers. Based on their experience with the company, they informed reporter Dan Whateley that the numbers should not be trusted.
As of October last year, 13 million active users were said to be on the platform alongside 60 million app downloads, but a screenshot of one of the company’s analytic dashboards provided to Business Insider suggests otherwise.
The screenshot which was taken just a few weeks after the company’s public announcement indicates only 2 million monthly active users on iOS and about 484,000 monthly active users on Android.
It was confirmed by four of the six former employees of Triller that the app’s MAU count ranged from 1 million to 2.5 million at the time.
They claim to know this because they had access to the app’s Localytics dashboard. The other two also stated that they recalled the MAU count to be about 1 to 2.5million, however, they didn’t exactly name Localytics.
Triller went on to release a statement stating that the former employees were spreading inaccurate information, as they were probably still angry about their departure from the company.
Meanwhile, Apptopia, a third-party mobile analytics firm estimates that Triller’s number of lifetime installs was only 52 million as of August, a significant difference from the company’s report of 250 million.
Triller has, however, been drawing a lot of attention lately because of the US president’s threat to ban its larger rival, TikTok. President Trump’s ire against TikTok is due to a Chinese company, ByteDance being its parent company.