Posted on 08/03/2012 3:38:07 PM PDT by markomalley
During the height of the Rush Limbaugh/Sandra Fluke controversy in March, software company Carbonite announced it would no longer sponsor the conservative radio host. As CEO David Friend said at the time:
No one with daughters the age of Sandra Fluke, and I have two, could possibly abide the insult and abuse heaped upon this courageous and well-intentioned young lady. Mr. Limbaugh, with his highly personal attacks on Miss Fluke, overstepped any reasonable bounds of decency. Even though Mr. Limbaugh has now issued an apology, we have nonetheless decided to withdraw our advertising from his show. We hope that our action, along with the other advertisers who have already withdrawn their ads, will ultimately contribute to a more civilized public discourse.
Liberals touted the action as proof that Limbaugh was becoming toxic and his show was in danger. So how has dumping Limbaugh worked out for Carbonite? Not so well. Turns out alienating Rush’s fans may have been more damaging than alienating his critics. As the blog Legal Insurrection noted today:
On August 1 Carbonite released its 2d Quarter 2012 results, the first full quarter after dropping Limbaugh in March. The results shocked Wall Street, as Carbonite did not meet its growth targets, causing multiple analysts to drop the target price. The stock dropped 15% in a day.
What’s more, in a conference call, Friend linked the decline to the Limbaugh action:
Yeah, I’d say it turned out to be a bigger issue than we had anticipated. Because you know at the time there was a lot of noise, I mean we had a huge spike in web traffic around that time just because of all the interest in the whole subject. And it took close to a month for that to sort of die down. And meanwhile our metrics were, we really couldn’t see what was going because there was so much noise around the website that we had no idea what the ultimate impact was going to be. It turned out to be a bigger hole in our revenue than we had thought when we initially did this.
Friend added that he was “not regretful of the decision. I think things would have been worse had we not done that.” Legal Insurrection’s William Jacobson calls that “laughable” adding: “It’s too convenient now to say things would have been worse, when Friend completely misjudged the impact of dropping Limbaugh.”
Carbonate was unusable for me would have taken days to do a back up.
LOL! Have a Chick-fil-A!
Good one!
. "courageous and well-intentioned"....I about spit up on my keyboard with that.
As I always say, liberals are incapable of embarrassment. Which is necessary given their limited powers of reasoning and large mouths.
I hate to sound like a jerk but I’m glad it cost Carbonite a lot of money and I hope all the other companies that dropped him were hurt too.
Obviously though not much of a lesson has been learned if they think their company would have been hurt more by continuing to advertise with Rush.
As I told the companies I quit doing business with over the Rush brouhaha, conservatives have money and spend it with the companies that advertise and support the people they support. Liberals are often less well off in that area and just say they used your company in the past and won’t use it in the future - they lie. At one company when I told them that, I was laughed at! Wonder who is laughing now?
I thought Carbonite was one of the companies begging to come back.
___________________
I read that Mattress Firm asked to come back almost immediately after cancelling, not sure about Carbonite.
With all due respect, she was neither. I have two daughters, as well. Both of them older -- and more mature -- than Ms. Fluke.
Neither would've allowed themselves to be used -- as Ms. Fluke was used -- in service to a political agenda. Especially one that was counter to their own moral standards...
I tried Carbonite and it slows down your pc speed anyhow.
A lesson to others: that "noise" is liberal astroturfing from a few savvy computer users to make you think that there is a big groundswell of support.
Carbonite appears to have not learned this lesson. Will you?
-PJ
Too bad, so sad.
What’s even funnier was Rush saying on his show (multiple times) that most of the sponsors who cancelled tried to come crawling back, but Rush told them NO.
I worked, at one point in time, for a major PC OEM that looking for a partner to provide online backup for consumer customers. We had a meeting with Carbonite - the VP of Marketing had the worst rug on his head, he looked like a clown. Worse, the technical guy they brought couldn’t answer basic questions about how their agents and backend software worked.
I wouldn’t trust them backing up pictures of my neighbor’s cat.
I dropped them in the middle of my subscription, maybe a bit earlier than the middle. I can’t blame fiscal conservatives for waiting till the end of their paid time, but screw ‘em, wanted nothing more to do with them. Went with MyPCBackup, & it works for Mac. It’s quicker and not intrusive.
The old "I meant to do that!" excuse.
plan to dump it by then.
***
1) mozy.com if you don’t have an IT department
2) datastorageunit.com if you do
Always thought it was a flukey product. At the time I spitefully wished I were a customer so I could drop them.
The “freebies” are not free. They are paid for by raising the rates on other policy holders.
I'm only still using it because I already paid for it...but took off my credit card info so they're sol after this runs out. Whoever made this decision is a tone deaf idiot.
I’m sure all policies will go up. It will be couched as a cost of living thing, but it will happen.
You know how activist women’s groups are. Do you think they would stand still if men were covered for these things, and they didn’t get something of equal value?
Maternity
Contraceptives
Pap Smears
Breast Exams
Pre-natal care
Pediatrician services
All this is now covered for single women with a health plan.
What do single men get?
The obvious come-back is that when men and women are married, the man benefits too. And I’ll grant that. I have no problem with these services being a part of a heterosexual marriage plan and these being the provisions for a family unit.
So this should be thought of as a single vs single situation.
If there were two different policy costs, one for single men and one for single women, perhaps women would find it even more appealing to have children in a marriage setting.
I’m not trying to be unfair to women here. These new rules do seem to raise an issue of premiums men vs women though.
Sorry ladies...
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