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.” Within 24 hours, Vanity Fair added 13,000 subscribers.
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.
