Vanity Fair is the latest news organization to profit from President-elect Donald Trump’s Twitter ire.
The Condé Nast magazine has seen its subscriptions rise 100 fold Thursday after Donald Trump tweeted that the publication was “way down, big trouble, dead.”
This is the highest number of subscriptions sold in a single day ever at Condé Nast, according to a spokesperson.
Has anyone looked at the really poor numbers of @VanityFair Magazine. Way down, big trouble, dead! Graydon Carter, no talent, will be out!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 15, 2016
Trump’s wrath might have stemmed from an unflattering review of the Trump Grill titled “Trump Grill could be the worst restaurant in America.” Among other things, it called the Trump Tower restaurant “a cheap version of rich” and called the dumplings “flaccid.”
That story has garnered nearly 1 million unique visitors since Trump’s tweet, according to a spokesperson. The Hive, Vanity Fair’s business, media and tech vertical, has seen more than 330,000 unique visitors to other Trump-related stories since the tweet.
The magazine smartly capitalized on the attention by rolling out a subscription ad that proclaimed Vanity Fair “the magazine Trump doesn’t want you to read.”
Trump has inadvertently bestowed readership and revenue on several publications by abusing them online in recent months. Subscriptions to The New York Times surged after the election and donations to many nonprofit news organizations also saw a dramatic increase.
Benjamin Mullin is the managing editor of Poynter.org. He previously reported for Poynter as a staff writer, Google Journalism Fellow and Naughton Fellow, covering journalism innovation, business practices and ethics. He’s also reported for USA TODAY College and The Sacramento Bee, and he was editor in chief of The Orion, Chico State’s student-run newspaper. An Air Force brat who grew up around Northern California, he’s still adjusting to the Florida sunshine.
