Company That Dumped Limbaugh Over 'Flukegate' Admits: Yeah, That Hurt us More Than we Expected it Would

"I’d say it turned out to be a bigger issue than we had anticipated."

Remember when the mainstream media and leftists everywhere flew into a rage because Rush Limbaugh associated 30-year-old Georgetown student Sandra Fluke with a rude word?

Do you also remember when the CEO of long-time Limbaugh sponsor Carbonite announced that his company could no longer associate itself with the EIB Network? Sure you do:

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 We hope that our action, along with the other advertisers who have already withdrawn their ads, will ultimately contribute to a more civilized public discourse.

Well, despite losing a few sponsors and having Media Matters lead a campaign to have him removed from the airwaves, Limbaugh is still here and he’s still annoying the left.

Oh, yeah, and it appears Carbonite’s decision to drop the EIB Network hasn’t worked out so well for them.

“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,” William A. Jacobson writes for Legal Insurrection.

“The stock dropped 15 [percent] in a day,” he adds.

But the most interesting part about all of this is the fact that Carbonite CEO David Friend may have admitted on Wednesday that dropping Limbaugh hurt the company.

Here’s a transcript of Friend's admission [via Legal Insurrection, emphasis added]:

Friend: “There were four factor that contributed to this slower growth. First, in March we stopped working with one of our top producing radio endorsers. While we recently contracted with three new radio personalities, it takes 3-6 months to ramp up new radio hosts so we probably won’t see the full effect of this for another quarter or two.”
Q: “I guess I’m a little surprised that you were caught by surprise by the radio host change ’cause I know we’ve talked and I guess my impression was that it wouldn’t be that impactful but I guess it was quite impactful.
Friend: “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. However, I don’t think there was any, I’m not regretful of the decision, I think things would have been worse had we not done that.

“The last statement by Friend, that the damage would have been worse had Carbonite not dropped Limbaugh is laughable. Friend has been caught doing serious damage to shareholders based on a political decision which was taken precipitously on a Saturday night,” Jacobson writes.

“It’s too convenient now to say things would have been worse, when Friend completely misjudged the impact of dropping Limbaugh,” he adds.

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Click here to read Jacobson's full report, this story has been updated.

(H/T: Washington Examiner)