Potential buyers line up for Weather Channel
Cory Bergman March 5th, 2008
Landmark Communications wants as much as $5 billion for the Weather Channel and Weather.com, and preliminary bids are due next week. So who’s interested? NBCU, Time Warner, CBS and Comcast, among others. Meanwhile, Silicon Alley did some rough math and valued Weather.com at $2 billion. “Is that realistic?” Peter Kafka writes. “More so than any other news niche, weather information is a commodity… Weather.com is undoubtedly a valuable URL, but beyond that, not sure what the site offers that isn’t easily duplicated or displaced.” In other words, as weather information become available everywhere, will Weather.com be able to hold its dominance in traffic?
3 Comments Add your own
1. oakling | March 5th, 2008 at 11:40 am
It’s an academic point in some ways, since the sale is for the Weather Channel as well. At least, if weather.com can’t hold its dominance, the buyer can try to make up the difference with the Weather Channel. But it seems to me that a savvy buyer could amp up weather.com’s content to make it more useful and relevant to visitors.
2. News Consumer | March 5th, 2008 at 6:36 pm
5 billion? yowsers!
3. Barry S. | March 8th, 2008 at 1:53 pm
$5B is pretty rich. Landmark as a whole - maybe $3B.
2.5B - Wx Channel + Web being the bulk of that. $500M combined for everything else.. But the true value of Landmark is what someone is actually willing to pay for it.
I’m a little short on cash this month, otherwise, I’d be making an offer. ($3.xx gas, ya know)
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