Just as the campaign to ostracize Chick-fil-A seems to have blown up in leftists' faces, so too has the earlier left-wing censorship campaign to pressure advertisers of conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh.
Limbaugh's ratings are higher than before the recent brouhaha over Sandra Fluke and the effort to remove him from the air is collapsing on itself. Now more bad news has come out for the Rush haters: Former Limbaugh advertiser Carbonite has now publicly stated that its decision to pull its ads from his show has been bad for the company's bottom line.
On August 1, Carbonite CEO David Friend held a conference call to announce the company's second-quarter earnings results. They weren't good which led the company's stock to drop 15 percent in same-day trading.
Key to the drop in Carbonite's growth was its withdrawal from Limbaugh's show. By withdrawing its ads under pressure from the far left, Carbonite disrupted its own business model of attracting many small-time accounts through mass advertising.
"It turned out to be a bigger hole in our revenue than we had thought when we initially did this," Friend said on the investor call.
The company tried to offset the publicity hit by expanding advertising to other radio hosts, not realizing that it would take months for it to reach the kind of audience they had already established via Limbaugh.
