The Weather Channel for sale…
The New York Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin writes about The Weather Channel being put up for sale and the who’s who of suitors lining up to buy it…
The channel is also a godsend for advertisers. Like live sports, it is largely immune from TiVos and other digital video recorders. The channel has 800 employees; 125 are meteorologists.
Perhaps more appealing for some big media companies may be the Weather Channel’s Web business, which was started in 1995. Weather.com ranks as the nation’s 18th-largest media site by traffic, with more than 32 million unique users in November, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. That is bigger than CNN and Facebook.
Weather.com has partnerships with dozens of big media companies. In October, the site struck a deal to provide forecasts to MySpace, a unit of the News Corporation. The company also has deals with Yahoo and AOL.
Among the Weather Channel’s suitors, NBC is expected to compete aggressively, people involved in the auction said. NBC has a weather-related unit called NBC Weather Plus, a joint project of NBC News and NBC affiliates, but the venture has never taken off. NBC Weather Plus includes a cable channel, frequently available only on digital cable platforms and high on the dial, along with a Web site, weatherplus.com.
Fox, a unit of the News Corporation, has also expressed interest in the Weather Channel, which it could link with its Fox News cable channel and its hundreds of affiliates. Other big media companies like Comcast, which is increasingly looking to add content, may participate in the auction as well. Time Warner and perhaps even Yahoo could also jump in.
News Corp might as well buy TWC and commandeer its channel spot for FBN! Or they could wait around and do the same thing to MSNBC for a lot less than 5 billion. Oh and the weather.com “crew” could help FNC/FBN in their paltry web offerings too.
Comment by Terance — January 3, 2008 @ 9:09 am
Wow, you would think a company wouldn’t be crazy enough to sell the property with those statistics. The interesting matter to whoever owns it is if they will try to limit partnerships and whatnot the company has, I mean, they run the weather services for multiple websites and already have linkups with stations across the USA.
Comment by Chris — January 3, 2008 @ 10:13 am
Great. NBC/Uni is looking for another place to run Law & Order 24/7.
Comment by Jim — January 3, 2008 @ 11:28 am
“Great. NBC/Uni is looking for another place to run Law & Order 24/7.”
Hahaha. Priceless
Comment by Barb — January 3, 2008 @ 1:51 pm
If NBC buys it, won’t we be hearing “global warming” 24/7?
Comment by Missy — January 3, 2008 @ 3:39 pm
I have never been impressed with the local NBC Weather Plus. We also have a local ABC weather channel which is also lousy.
About a week ago, Spud posted a thread about HLN having a larger CUME than any of the other news channels. I’ll bet the Weather Channel CUME is higher than anybody! I regularly check out the “Local On The 8s”
Comment by Ira — January 3, 2008 @ 3:52 pm
I’d put money on News Corp. as buyer.
Comment by Goldfish — January 3, 2008 @ 6:35 pm
I don’t know, I bet it will be a smaller company. Why would News. Corp buy another thing after the big Dow Jones deal?
Comment by jmkaib — January 3, 2008 @ 7:54 pm