14 DAY TRIAL // "Welcome to the Weather Channel. All weather, all day" (yawn). That's the quote I would use to best describe my feelings when I've heard of the deal that is about to go down. No way this could be worth three times more than YouTube! No, abso-frickin'-lutely not!
Checking the story a little deeper, I found that its site is actually the 18th most popular site in the United States, according to Nielsen/NetRatings and that means a lot. It had over 32 million unique users in November, and to compare it to some sites that you have heard more often of, like CNN and Facebook, it trumps them both. The bidders for it seem to include NBC, Comcast and News Corp., but the highest chances seem to go the NBC way simply because it would mean the lesser percentage of the buyer's worth. For Comcast, the deal would be approximately 9 percent (way too much), for News Corp. the Dow Jones deal looks to be a lot closer to going through, while NBC's parent company, GE, is worth an approximate 370 billion dollars, making the 5 asked for to be a measly 1.3 percent, as Amit Chowdhry observed.
The Weather Channel transaction is a big deal, because it has recently struck a deal to provide weather forecasts to MySpace on top to the previous ones that it had with Yahoo! and AOL.
The New York Times have Debora J. Wilson, the Weather Channel's chief executive, divulging that "Every media conglomeration has approached Landmark, and there's never been a yes. We actually think that we're stronger being independent." Sad news, but it looks like the Landmark Communications is being broken up and sold and there's not much if anything at all to be done about it. Luckily, as the deal is reported, this is not by far the end of the 1982 created Channel and of its success.
(By the way, the quote in the begining is from Johnny Bravo)