Wonkette Loses Ads After Trig Palin Post

The needlessly mean-spirited blog post about Trig Palin’s birthday that Dodd Harris wrote about yesterday, has had a rather quick and immediate impact over at Wonkette:

At least nine advertisers have announced plans to pull their ads from Wonkette after the political blog ran a post making fun of Sarah Palin’s son, Trig.

Wonkette’s Jack Stuef wrote an item Monday poking fun at a poem that had been posted by Team Sarah for Trig’s birthday, with the refrain “Oh little boy, what are you dreaming about?” Stuef cracked: “What’s he dreaming about? Nothing. He’s retarded.” Trig Palin has Down syndrome.

It took about 36 hours, as David Weigel noted at Slate, but the conservative blogosphere, led by Big Journalism editor-in-chief Dana Loesch and Big Government writer Derek Hunter, picked up on the post and used it to drive a campaign to pressure Wonkette’s advertisers to drop the site.

Advertisers began announcing their plans to stop advertising on Wonkette via Twitter. By Loesch’s count, so far the boycotters include Papa Johns, Huggies, the Vanguard Group, Holland America Cruises, Nordstrom, Bob Evans Farms, Reliant Energy, DealSwarm and Coldwell Banker.

As Brand Channel points out, such boycotts are complicated because most of Wonkette’s banner ads are served by an ad network, meaning different ads appear each time users refresh the page.sin

I have no idea whether this will cause any actual harm to Wonkette’s revenue stream, and I honestly don’t care. I stopped reading that site on a regular basis since shortly after Ana Marie Cox left and the site went from a snarky take on politics and Washington, D.C. to mean-spirited sniping masquerading as humor.

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Doug Mataconis
About Doug Mataconis
Doug Mataconis held a B.A. in Political Science from Rutgers University and J.D. from George Mason University School of Law. He joined the staff of OTB in May 2010 and contributed a staggering 16,483 posts before his retirement in January 2020. He passed far too young in July 2021.

Comments

  1. William Teach says:

    Considering they have lost most of their advertisers, their revenue stream should be about dried up. The law of “we shoulda seen this coming” is in full effect.