• by Kate Kaye , December 2, 2002

Who’s number one in online weather? That’s a good question.

Innovations in the distribution and presentation of weather content have prompted changes in the measurement of these online entities, but, like weather forecasts sometimes do, the reports lack in consistency.

There are few Web categories that see daily, even more-than-daily action from dedicated users. The heavy-hitters, The Weather Channel’s Weather.com and WeatherBug, regularly score high in Media Metrix’s monthly top 50 sites ranking. Offering a flurry of new user services and advertising opportunities, the two are battling to reach number one weather site status.

Weather.com shares the online weather space with AccuWeather, Weather Underground (wunderground.com) and Intellicast, but none of its competitors is more threatening than WeatherBug. The free desktop application relies on the constant presence of its local temperature readings on users’ system trays (next to the digital clock) to stay top-of-mind with consumers. Its unique “Sponsor Select” feature allows users to choose the advertiser they want to brand their application interface.

When users click the temperature display on their system trays, a branded WeatherBug window is launched which integrates advertising into WeatherBug’s extended weather content. According to general manager and VP of business development, Andy Jedynak, WeatherBug targets “tons of demographic groups” for hundreds of advertisers including Intel, British Airways and AOL.

Refined geo-targeting is a major factor for advertisers in the space because users must submit specific location data such as zip code to obtain local forecasts. Still, Weather.com’s chief revenue officer, Paul Iaffaldano, plays down targeting based on geography and other demographics. Weather.com often targets by consumer affinity with its content channels which provide weather information in the context of specific interests such as golf, health, football and home and garden. Weather.com was the tenth online ad revenue earner of 2001 according to a March 8, 2002 ComScore MediaMetrix report.

In addition to its free ad-supported and subscriber versions of its Desktop Weather application, Weather.com has recently launched a subscription weather alert service called Notify! through which users receive customized weather alerts sent to their email addresses, home phones, cell phones and pagers.

“It’s fairly obvious why Weather.com is the dominate force,” says Neilsen//NetRatings senior analyst, Carolyn Clark, alluding to the site’s ideal domain name, traffic-driving cable TV outlet, and affiliations with large portals like MSN and Yahoo. Beginning in October, Neilsen//NetRatings began tracking application data in addition to site traffic. The research firm ranks Weather.com as number one in October, tracking 16.7 million unique users compared to around 7.7 million for WeatherBug.

These figures don’t jibe with comScore/Media Metrix reports which placed WeatherBug at number one in September with just under 15.5 million unique visitors compared to 13.5 for Weather.com. Conversely, Neilsen//NetRatings tracked just 7.6 million WeatherBug uniques for the same period (about the same as October’s Neilsen//NetRatings number), and over 15.7 unique Weather.com users. Still, according to Neilsen//NetRatings’s Clark and comScore/Media Metrix senior manager, Max Kalehoff, both firms count only an actively open window that’s visible on a user’s monitor as traffic.

An exact match is not expected. However, doesn’t the significance of the online weather space demand more uniformity?