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Cumulus: Limbaugh boycott cost 'millions'

Cumulus Media CEO Lew Dickey said yesterday that the advertiser boycott against Rush Limbaugh cost his company millions of dollars in revenue for the first two quarters of the year.

"It hit us pretty hard," Dickey said during a call with financial analysts yesterday. "A couple of million bucks in the first quarter and a couple of million bucks in quarter two."

Dickey would not give exact figures, but said the "millions" accounted for "about one percent" of the roughly $245 million in first quarter revenues, and said he expected revenue to return to normal in June.

Cumulus owns just 38 of the 600 stations that air the Rush Limbaugh Show, which is nationally syndicated by Cumulus's competitor, Clear Channel Media. For its part, Clear Channel saw total revenues increase 6 percent the first quarter of 2011 to $671.5 million in the first quarter of 2012, according to MediaPost.

Progressive groups, including Media Matters For America, started the boycott campaigns in early March after Limbaugh called Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke a "slut" and a "prostitute" because of her support for government insurance coverage for contraceptives. Angelo Carusone, the creator of MMFA's "Stop Rush" campaign, has consistently said that Limbaugh is suffering from the loss of advertisers, while Limbaugh continues to claim that the losses have been negligible and that new advertisers have filled the void.

On Twitter, Carusone celebrated Cumulus's revenue losses: "See! Your participation does matter," he wrote to supporters. "Onward."

Meanwhile, the conservative website The Right Sphere dismissed Carusone's celebration as exaggeration, calling Cumulu's 1 percent revenue loss the equivalent of a "rounding error."

In related news: Limbaugh launched a new campaign today called "Rush Babes," meant to counter similar boycott efforts by the National Organization for Women.