It’s whoever buys the most commercials for his show. And right now, that’s Mike Lindell, the Minnesota pillow magnate? Wait, what? How do you get so rich shuffling pillows around?
Crap. If only I’d known that spending years in training in biology and spending decades teaching wasn’t a recipe for getting rich. I could have used my one life to buy foam, cut it into rectangles, and stuff it into fabric covers, and then society would have rewarded me with power, influence, and the ability to yell my crazy ideas at old people watching Fox News. I wasted my life, dammit.
Anyway, Tucker Carlson let Mike Lindell freely bellow lunatic conspiracy theories on his show, after the MyPillow guy had been banned from Twitter for being too dangerously wacky for even that medium.
On Tuesday night, pillow salesman Mike Lindell headed to Tucker Carlson Tonight, where his ads routinely kick in more than a third of the show’s advertising budget, to inform the world that he has been canceled. The night before, the MyPillow CEO had been permanently banned from Twitter after what a Twitter spokesperson called “repeated violations of our Civic Integrity Policy” related to misinformation pertaining to the 2020 presidential election.
I did a double-take on that one bit — so ads for pillows from one manufacturer constitute a third of the revenue stream for Tucker Carlson? I guess he would feel some pressure to avoid alienating the wild-eyed ranting buffoon.
I analyzed 3 months of Tucker Carlson's advertising. Th data shows just how few are companies willing advertise on the show.
During this period, there were a total of 745 minutes of ads.
MyPillow: 302 mins
All Others Combined: 443 minsHe's essentially a 1 advertiser show. pic.twitter.com/PEcSPt6YrN
— Angelo Carusone (@GoAngelo) June 11, 2020
He was, of course, on national TV to complain about cancel culture and being silenced. Irony is dead, but at least the corpse has a nice comfy pillow to lie on.
Lindell is also taking advantage of huge ad purchases on OAN and Eric Metaxas’s radio show to go on those programs to whine about how he can’t make himself heard anymore.
All this raises big questions in my head. Are pillows that big a deal for people who tune into Conservative Old People’s Media? I can’t remember when I last bought a pillow — maybe a decade or more ago, and I’m not feeling any pressing need for a new one now. I’m curious about cause and effect. Do people who need a new pillow spontaneously turn to Carlson and Metaxas to shop? Or does watching Carlson and Metaxas suddenly make one desire something soft to lie on? As I get older, will I start seeking pillows? We’re raising lots of flies in the lab right now, and fly larvae go into a wandering phase where they crawl up unto the side of their container to pupate — is this like a hardwired behavioral transition, too?
Lindell isn’t the sole advertiser, though. Other companies pouring money into the conservative trough are weight loss plans, Caribbean vacations, personal EKGs, and restaurant delivery services, which altogether paint an interesting picture of the typical Fox News aficionado.
Can’t ANYONE find a pillow to suffocate Lindell with?1??
I used to find myself buying a new set of pillows every couple of years, because they’re quite bulky things and take up lots of space when you’re moving from one flat to another. Since I have no means to transport my stuff apart from a couple of shoulder bags, I ended up just getting new ones at the other end – it’s cheaper than hiring someone with a car or van to move them for me.
I’m not sure I’d have felt that luxury, high-end pillows were worth the additional expense. Particularly if they were helping to fund dangerous conspiracy loons.
If it has a MyPillow then no, it does not.
For a while I was waking up with much stiffness in my back. My husband got me a new pillow (something with memory foam). After a few nights – stiffness gone! I guess older people are more likely to have such problems.
“Lindell isn’t the sole advertiser, though. Other companies pouring money into the conservative trough are weight loss plans, Caribbean vacations, personal EKGs, and restaurant delivery services, which altogether paint an interesting picture of the typical Fox News aficionado.”
Don’t forget boner pills. There are a lot of ads for those on conservative shows, at least talk radio.
The power of advertising. If you watch much TV, broadcast TV anyway, you would be amazed at the amount of junk they’re pushing, saturating the poor, bedraggled nerve cells of your prefrontal cortex, and attacking the brakes on your impulsive behavior.
That said, and speaking as a not so golden oldie, it’s taken me a lot of experimenting to get some semblance of a good nights sleep– which involves carefully arranging a number of cushions and throw pillows on a couch. It’s been quite a while since I’ve slept on a bed.
I guess I am confused by the economics. How many pillows does Mike sell each year? How much does he make on each pillow? How much does it cost to advertise on “America’s Favorite Racist” (i.e. Tucker’s show)? In other words, money is what keeps Fox News afloat and going (and by all accounts it is quite profitable). The racist’s show is the flagship of Fox News. How much money is it bringing in? How can this flow of cash be disrupted?
It’s not just pillows, it’s mattresses, blankets, bathrobes, and whatever.
Maybe reddit can take him down…
What if Tucker Carlson just has a thing for moderately expensive pillows sold by dipshits? But I mean, he could be buying them up himself, and then I don’t know what … asphyxiating kittens with them possibly.
I have wondered the same thing myself. It’s not like there aren’t already many foam pillows to choose from. It’s all about product differentiation.
With MyPillow, you’re not just getting a pillow, you’re getting a pillow from a former crack addict who found Jesus.
You might be able to make a living some selling some kind of undifferentiated commodity product, but you’ll need an angle. Maybe you could renounce atheism, and then slap your name and picture and a Bible verse on K-cups of some otherwise indistinguishable coffee blend. That’s just one idea. I am sure you can think of others. You may not like it. I guess it depends on how much you need the cash.
Blanket advertising bolstering up Carlson’s show, eh?
I’m a side sleeper who needs a pretty tall and firm pillow to be comfortable (or my back won’t let me sleep more than about 7 hours), but I’m not willing to pay $80+ for a fancy (and presumably longer-lasting pillow), so I usually buy about one a year.
A couple of years ago I tried out a MyPillow at the store and was surprised how bad/cheap/nasty it felt, especially for the price. They’re not $20 pillows!
There’s other shredded memory foam pillows around. Lindell’s aren’t anything new or special, except for the Jesus.
The Tucker Carlson Brand Personal EKG: For when the existence of minorities makes you so angry, you have to regularly check your heart.
Only works if you have a heart.
Restaurant delivery services? Don’t these morons know that Covid is a myth and they are duty bound to exercise their freedom to go maskless in public and infect everyone with their lunacy by dining at their local restaurant.
Let’s crowdfund a couple of weeks of blanket pro-climate change advertising on Tucker Carlson’s show and see if that forces him to bend his agenda
My brother sells Lindell’s products to make his living, although he hates his ideology. He said that since many retail stores decided to stop carrying My Pillow stuff, telephone sales have at least tripled! Apparently, the unwashed Faithful are flocking to his rescue. When I was in retail 45 years ago, we used to sell similar pillows for cheap. They were merely pillow ticks filled with chopped foam, and they sucked. Lindell probably got the idea from the pillow he was sleeping on in prison. It probably costs less than $2 to make. For my money, you can’t beat a good, solid foam-rubber pillow.
you can’t beat a good, solid foam-rubber pillow
Apropos of nothing, I myself prefer a down pillow, albeit I’ve no opinon on the source of the feathers (the mildly deranged penguin does have an opinion — it’s about the only thing, she claims, walruses are good for).
As a note about selling pillows: I haven’t found a pillow that I can both sleep on¹ and that lasts more than about five years since some time around 1990². For me, I find that pillows start entering the “I should replace these soon” state in about two years and they are useless within five. You might just be atypically easy on your pillows, (either that, or they’ve been replaced without you noticing).
If we assume that pillows need to be replaced after five years of use and that the average person has 1.5 pillows, that puts the US market at something like 100+ million pillows sold per year. (A check shows the US sleeping pillow market to have been at ¾ of a billion dollars a decade ago, so that seems about right.)
1: i.e. Not the rocks that I find memory foam to be.
2: That was the old style of cheap pillow that was just a block of soft open-cell foam sewn into a bag. You can’t get them any more because the fiber-fill things are cheaper to make.