On the Sac Forums message board (www.sacforums.com), a poster going by the screen name "Privacy916" called for a boycott of the Bee and its advertisers.

"The latest opinion piece added to [the Bee’s Web site] gloats over the huge spike in traffic their site has received because of this," the blogger wrote. "Undoubtedly, a huge percent is state workers, or people like us, who will not support their advertisers. Unfortunately, the way it works is that the Bee can now say that their ads will be in front of X number of visitors instead of Y. We want to stop providing them this traffic, so it goes well below average and give them a new variable, Z."