No one can say with any authority how many folks were both Rush listeners and Carbonite-users. My humble guess is that somewhere around thirty percent of the Carbonite user base were Rush fans. Toss in another twenty-five percent of the user base who might be Republican. So there might be a trend started, with several thousand folks indicating that they will be quitting. By summer, they may have lost half their base.
You could make up the situation by advertising....but where do you cast your limited advertising dollars? Common sense says you run right back to Conservative-talk radio, but another front person....I doubt if they’d let you in the front door. So you start looking....maybe over at the OWN-network, but they have lousy numbers and are mostly women. Then you start to look at reality TV shows...just to get some kind of attention.
What they eventually discover is that they are now labeled a anti-conservative company, and people won’t even listen to them because of that label.
If you ask me...it’s a spiral trend for the stock, and some company...probably Google....makes a minor attempt to buy Carbonite by this fall. Whatever they offer....if I were Carbonite, I’d accept. It just won’t get any better. With the name change....business might improve.
A book will eventually be written by the Carbonite CEO, explaining that they never dreamed of the day when a stumble by Rush....would bring down their business. They could back-up everything else in life....but they could not back-up their own basic operation.
A rush to judgement
Randi Rhodes?
This stock was dying to begin with. This has nothing to do with Limbaugh, but with management most likely.
Carbonite IPO’d in August of last year. After IPO, the share price settled at around $15 and has been dropping in a linear fashin since then to $8.71 as of this week.
Go to stockcharts and type in CARB for Carbonite.
http://stockcharts.com/h-sc/ui
what killed them in the end was that by leaving Rush we found out they were a lefty operation and everyone fled I used them once, but turn on Rush, and you are not worthy
A book will eventually be written by the Carbonite CEO, explaining that they never dreamed of the day when a stumble by Rush......
I don’t think it was a stumble by Rush. It was a piss-poor business decision by the CEO. Just like that mattress joint, ?-Train.
A book will eventually be written by the Carbonite CEO, explaining that they never dreamed of the day when a stumble by Rush....would bring down their business.
Great post and analysis. But the above sentence is incorrect. Carbonite was hurt by pulling away from rush, not by rush’s statement.
I saw a carbonite ad on tv a few minutes ago on speed channel.
Cloud based data storage is a commodity. Carbonite got in early and positioned themselves nicely. They’ll never recapture their position. I doubt they liquidate, they’ll sell their remaining user base to Cisco or Amazon or somebody and never be heard from again.
I actually began using Carbonite because of Rush; but was badly disappointed when my computer crashed and it did NOT backup my “Outlook Express” e-mails. I dropped it.