Sydney Sweeney’s follower count has rebounded after an initial 200,000-follower drop following criticism surround her recent Novig ad. The 29-year-old actress has often cast herself in a starring role in the culture war in the past year, with appearances in adverts drawing both the awe and ire of the American public. This latest ad featured a mostly nude Sweeney, pretending to play and posing with various pieces of sports items.
Novig is a sports-focused prediction market that was founded in 2021 and is now valued at around $500 million. Backlash to the ad was not immediate but swelled slowly in the days after the advert was released, before exploding. Female athletes said that it was sexualizing women’s sport.
Four-time Olympic swimming champion Ariarne Titmus said she was “infuriated,” asking how society could still be “monetizing a woman’s body and sexualizing women’s sport.” Amy Hunt, a British sprinter, looked into a BBC camera after a race and said, “This is what women in sport look like. Muscles, hard work, sweat, blood, tears.” Social media videos with the tagline “I absolutely fking hate Sydney Sweeney’s new sport ad,” accompanied by footage of women’s sporting competitions, quickly amassed millions of views online. Newsweek has contacted a representative for Sweeney via email for comment.
Newsweek reviewed analytics data on the tool Social Blade to look at how Sweeney’s social media following has fluctuated since the Novig ad was released. Overall, Sweeney has lost an average of 118,000 followers over the past 14 days. On Wednesday, September 9, the day that the advert was released, she gained 2218 followers.
The next day, she gained 37,000 followers. On September 11, she gained 9,637 followers and then on September 12, she gained 3989. On September 13, as the backlash to the advert began to go viral, she lost 136,848 followers.
The following day, she lost 66,446 followers. That comes out to a loss of 203,294 followers in a 48-hour period. As of reporting on Wednesday morning, she has gained 102,936 followers in less than 48 hours, over September 15 and September 16.
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