Landmark Communications, the private owner of the Weather Channel, is putting the cable channel up for bid. It is expected to go for $5 billion or more, says the New York Times.
Aside from being the number one cable weather channel on television, the Weather Channel also owns weather.com, which Alexa cites as the 25th most popular website in the United States. Neilson/Net Ratings list it as “the nation’s 18th-largest media site by traffic, with more than 32 million unique users in November…. That is bigger than CNN and Facebook” (NYT). The company also has deals to supply weather information to MySpace (owned by News Corporation), Yahoo, and AOL.
Early in its life the Weather Channel wasn’t expected to amount to much, mostly due to its image as a place for “weather buffs.” However, its increasing coverage of hurricanes and other serious weather conditions, (somewhat controversial) programs about global warming, and the convenience of weather.com for checking forecasts and tracking hurricanes, have helped it capture a more mainstream audience. The New York Times calls the channel “a godsend for advertisers. Like live sports, it is largely immune from TiVos and other digital video recorders.”
Potential buyers include NBC, Fox (News Corporation), Comcast, Time Warner, and Yahoo. NBC already has a program called NBC Weather Plus, but it is not widely available outside of digital cable. The Weather Channel’s chief executive, Deborah J. Wilson, said in an interview last June that “Every media conglomeration has approached Landmark” about buying the channel.
This entry was posted on Thursday, January 3rd, 2008 at 9:43 pm and is filed under Industry News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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ahaservices Says:
on February 22nd, 2008 at 6:19 pm
sounds like a deal…………good luck