July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

You’ve come a long way, baby.

The Weather Company announced this morning that its tablet and smartphone apps have been downloaded over 100 million times and that it is launching a updated service. My Friends’ Weather, which is integrated into those 100 million apps, will alert people to major weather events and breaking alerts that might be affecting their friends.

A hundred million apps is a pretty significant milestone, and it highlights the digital achievements of a company that once was known as the weather “channel.” It’s a success story for old media in a new era.

How did the old media company do it?

“We focused on an unusual aspect of mobile: What’s the habit that we’re trying to capture for users,” Cameron Clayton, The Weather Company’s head of mobile, told me this morning. “That’s really what’s driven our downloads but also our engagement. Average users visit 34 times a month … more than once a day. The question was: How do we become like your wristwatch … so essential that even if you know the answer you still check it?”

The Weather Company’s digital prowess was on display late last year when Hurricane Sandy pounded the Eastern Seaboard. The company had a record day on October 29, with almost 300 million pageviews on its site, 125 million views on its apps, and 9.6 million views on its YouTube channel. A week after, CIO Bryson Koehler told me that they saw a 1,000 percent traffic spike during Sandy, including a period when the company was serving a staggering 110 gigabytes of data each and every second.

The mobile portion of that record was broken just a couple of months later at Christmas, as new device owners checked wintry weather conditions, generating 137.5 million pageviews on apps on December 26.

With 100 million downloads, it’s no surprise that the company’s app is the top weather app on iOS and Android, as well as one of the top overall downloads. The company jumped on mobile quickly, originally releasing an app for iOS in 2007 — just after the iPhone’s launch — and an Android app in 2008.

The new My Friends’ Weather, which the company originally launched this past summer, will now alert you when Facebook friends might be affected by extreme weather conditions. Working with Travelers, the insurance company, My Friends’ Weather shows friends in areas where a National Weather Service alert bulletin has been issued.

That will no doubt be a favorite feature of grannies and moms, but it’s not just about worrywarts. The goal is to connect that circle of friends and family that you really care about, Clayton told me.

“I’m from New Zealand and a buddy lives in Hawaii,” he said. “We hadn’t spoken in a year when all of a sudden I saw a heavy surf alert for Hawaii. So I sent him a note: I hope you’re out in this surf. Three hours later I received a reply … he had been out, and the surfing was epic. We hadn’t spoken in a year … and that’s the sort of thing we want to do for everyone who comes.”

A hundred million apps, now with social. And surfing.

photo credit: lrargerich via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Hurricane Sandy is hammering Weather.com‘s servers almost as hard as the shores of New Jersey.

Yesterday the Weather Company, which is the country’s biggest weather service, had a record traffic day with almost a half a billion pageviews as Americans flocked to its website, mobile apps, and video live streams to watch, wonder, and be warned at the devastation Sandy is bringing to the eastern United States.

That devastation includes perhaps 8 million out of power, at least six nuclear power plants shut down, and at least 16 dead in seven states.

On Monday Weather.com alone had a record 298 million pageviews, Melissa Medori, the Weather Channel’s public relations manager told me. That’s double the previous record, and triple what the site did during Hurricane Irene.

Wondering how The Weather Company’s servers survived? We asked them.

Part of Hurricane Sandy’s handiwork

The site’s mobile apps saw another 125 million page views (including a record number of video views), so totaling up all the digital audience with a few smaller sites, The Weather Company’s properties had 450 million pageviews in a single day.

That’s 200 million more than the previous record, set on February 1, 2011, during the historic snowstorm that saw 2o” of snow in some places in central and eastern U.S.

In addition, including all video streams across Weather.com and the site’s YouTube channel, the company delivered more than 9.6 million total live video streams, peaking at 167,000 concurrent viewers.

All of which means, Medori told me, that Weather.com had just as much video viewership as the Weather Channel itself — which at times yesterday had more viewership by itself than all the cable news networks combined.

Apparently, the site administrators are planning for an even bigger day. For the sake of those caught in the path of the storm, one can only hope that there is less to see.

photo credit: NASA Goddard Photo and Video via photopin cc, MTAPhotos via photopin cc

Weather.com, a subsidiary of the Weather Channel, has done well because of its focus. You want weather? It will give it to you, wherever you are. It has roughly 100 million viewers on TV, 40 million viewers on the web, and more than 10 million users on mobile devices.

Weather.com is the fourth most popular mobile destination in the U.S., only behind Facebook, Google, and Yahoo, according to the Weather Channel’s Cameron Clayton, vice president of mobile and international. As a purely “curated” content site, Weather ranks No.1, he said. Cameron spoke last night on a panel I moderated at MobileMonday in San Francisco.

But it turns out, Weather.com is actually dependent on Google and Yahoo for a significant amount of its traffic. If you type “weather” into Google, the search engine sends you to Weather.com. And on the mobile phone, with all kinds of people search for Weather while on the go, that traffic is huge. Compete shows that, on the web, 10 percent of Weather’s traffic comes from Google alone. In mobile, it might be more.

But here’s the rub: One notable ingredient of Weather.com’s success is its robust ad sales. It refused to deal with  ad networks like Google’s. It has its own salespeople, something Cameron says has become “religion” within the company. By default, that religion makes Google an infidel. Weather also shuns AdMob to serve mobile ads for its mobile offering.

This is all fine as long as Weather.com is just another content provider. But it isn’t. Weather.com has such a huge reach among mobile users that its ad-sales operations are now directly competing against Google’s (especially since Google now also owns the largest mobile ad distributor, AdMob). Google has ignored the conflict for a while, because it hasn’t dealt as much in mobile ads. It has spent most of its time developing Android for mobile devices, and apparently the AdMob deal had been in the works for two years. But now Google is going full bore on mobile. With the rise of the smartphone market, Google knows there’s huge potential for growth: In fact, a 200 to 300 percent per year potential, if AdMob’s recent growth is anything to go on.

I’m not suggesting Google will do anything drastic like cut off traffic to Weather.com in the short-term. Cameron tried to play down the threat last night, calling Google a “frenemy.” But Weather.com’s ad business certainly is the easiest target to attack among the big guys out there, if Google is really looking for a place to go. Why, Google may ask, is it sending Weather.com all that traffic? Why not send it to a source, perhaps homegrown, that serves Google/Admob ads?  There are other weather sources after all, such as the National Weather Service or Accuweather. One reason Google may be ok with the arrangement is that Weather.com makes Google its default search engine on its own site.

But one thing’s for sure: Google isn’t afraid of steamrolling people in its way. As we saw last week, when it launched Google Navigator, the future of navigation companies Tom Tom and Garmin suddenly dimmed. Their stocks plunged in the wake of the announcement. Fortunately, at least, for Weather.com, its URL is easy to remember, and will stick for a while in people’s memories — perhaps the one thing preventing it from becoming instant roadkill. At the same time, it’s hard not to see stormy days on Weather.com’s horizon.

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