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Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Dougherty - North America

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Weather.com for sale - anyone looking to buy loyalty?

January 04, 2008

Landmark Communications has announced the sale of The Weather Channel and the accompanying website Weather.com, which may be worth up to $5 billion (cited by The New York Times). Several media conglomerates will probably step up to the plate to acquire these valuable assets and quick glance at the online stats helps to put the price tag into perspective.

The online property is consistently the market leader within the weather category, capturing 36.7% of the total market share of visits in Dec. 2007. Weather.com was also the 2nd ranked site within the News & Media category during the same month.

Weather Market Share.png

Weather.com received the most traffic from other weather sites and search engines in Dec. 2007, each contributed 15% of the upstream traffic to the website. Overall, the traffic is distributed over a wide number of sources without significant reliance on any one source. Many of the sources are distribution partners for Weather.com content.

Beyond just the market share numbers, the website retains a majority of its audience due to the dynamic nature of the content. In Dec. 2007, 74% of the visitors overall to Weather.com were repeat visitors. Many of the visitors that come from their distribution partners also tend to be loyal - 84% of the upstream traffic were repeating visitors in Dec. 2007 from television sites and 83% from both sports and broadcast media sites. Email is also a successful channel for driving repeat visitors through opt-in alerts - 82% of the traffic from email sites were repeat visitors.

Loyalty is a key component, but new visitors are also always necessary for growth. While the percentage of loyal visitors is high for Weather.com, search was responsible for 15% of upstream traffic. Search and other weather sites are currently two of the most effective industries for customer acquisition for Weather.com (driving 43% and 35% new visitors in Dec., respectively); but that could certainly change with a new parent company.

Posted by Heather Dougherty at 05:34 PM | (1) | (0)
In Categories News and Media