Would-be TikTok competitor Triller has allegedly inflated its monthly active user numbers, according to a report published in Business Insider.
In the last month Triller — a short-form video app that has attracted a number of TikTok stars, including the most popular person on the platform, Charli D’Amelio — announced that it had more than 100 million monthly active users. Speaking to Business Insider, six former employees dispute those numbers, and they told reporter Dan Whateley that Triller’s numbers were shady, based on their experience with the company.
Back in October of last year, Triller said it had reached 13 million monthly active users and 60 million app downloads. A screenshot provided to Business Insider of one of the company’s analytics dashboards, however, shows a different story — only 2 million monthly active users on iOS and around 484,000 monthly active users on Android. It was taken just a few weeks after the company’s public announcement.
“Four of the six former Triller employees Business Insider spoke with confirmed that they had access to the Localytics dashboard and remembered Triller’s MAU count ranging between 1 million to 2.5 million at the time,” wrote Whateley in his story. “The other two said they remembered the MAU count being about that 1-2.5 million range at the time, but did not name Localytics in particular.”
Triller provided a statement to Business Insider, which said that the former employees were “disseminating inaccurate information.”
Meanwhile, the third-party mobile analytics firm Apptopia estimated that Triller had only 52 million lifetime installs this August — a number that’s vastly different than the company’s 250 million. That time, Triller threatened to sue over the difference. Lately, Triller has been drawing a lot of attention because TikTok, its larger rival, has been a target of President Trump’s ire. The president has threatened to ban TikTok because it is owned by a Chinese company, ByteDance.
