IKEA

Village Voice Media (VVM) will split off from its controversial Backpage.com online advertising site and create a new company for its struggling chain of alternative weekly newspapers and websites, VVM president Scott Tobias said.

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Twenty seven major advertisers, including H&M, AT&T, and Ikea, have pulled their ads from Village Voice Media due to the company’s alleged links to child sex trafficking.

Justin Wassel, a minister from Ohio, started a Change.org campaign asking U.S. companies to pull advertising from Village Voice Media after one of its properties, Backpage.com, was accused of allowing advertisements that support child sex trafficking.

Mayor Mike McGinn has written a letter to Village Voice Media CEO Jim Larkin expressing concerns about Backpage.com, the VVM-owned classified site that has been implicated in a long string of underage prostitution charges.

In the letter, McGinn noted that the policies VVM claimed they had in place to prevent pimps from trafficking underage prostitutes do not appear to be working; last month, for example, Seattle police rescued a 17-year-old girl who was posting Backpage ads for herself on a public library computer on behalf of her pimp, who remains at large.

Best Buy Co. Inc. doesn’t advertise with Village Voice Media, the publisher that owns the Minneapolis-based weekly City Pages. But the retailer is still being drawn into a controversy involving the sex-business ads that are run by Village Voice.

The nonprofit group Change.org, which is pressuring businesses to pledge not to advertise with the New York-based media company, said Thursday that Best Buy Co. Inc. (along with IKEA , AT&T , Barnes & Noble, the Miami Dolphins and other well-known companies) has agreed not to advertise in the paper.