Payback: Carbonite CEO admits dropping Limbaugh during Sandra Fluke controversy hurt sales growth

Rush Limbaugh's comments on the Sandra Fluke controversy caused Carbonite to join the boycott and suddenly drop sponsorship of Rush Limbaugh's radio show. The first full quarter results after the boycott are now in and it's not good. Carbonite failed to meet Wall Street's expectation and their stock price dropped 15% in one day!

Via Legal Insurrection:

(3:10) CEO 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.”

(24:15) 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.

CEO 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.