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Bonnie takes Web by storm
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August 26, 1998: 4:46 p.m. ET
Major weather sites seeing surge of traffic thanks to latest hurricane
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NEW YORK (CNNfn) - As Hurricane Bonnie makes its way up the Carolina coast, many leading Internet weather sites are seeing waves of new visitors.
Although many Web sites were unwilling to talk numbers, anyone who made a visit to any of the leading weather hangouts will notice they've been swamped.
The Weather Channel said Wednesday that it is on track to set a record of 100 million page views during the month.
Weather.com had 7.8 million page views on Monday and 9.7 million on Tuesday, said Todd Walrath, vice president of online services for the Weather Channel.
That handily beats the previous record of 5 million set in April.
"During severe weather, we play the same role as ESPN during the NCAA tournament or CNN during breaking world news. This is our time to take the lead in providing consumers with the latest storm information," Walrath said in a statement.
Accuweather, which divides its site into a free section and pay areas with additional content, said its Web site is also setting records.
"It started to become noticeable on Friday and stayed much higher than normal over the weekend. It's been at record levels all week," said Jim Candor, assistant vice president at Accuweather.
For a premium, weather enthusiasts can view up-to-the-minute radar images, a 10-day forecast and get expected weather conditions that are updated hourly. The free section features a five-day forecast and radar images updated every 15 minutes.
All users can access a hurricane center that shows the storm's current position and gives the hurricane's expected path over the next 48 hours.
Although the site is experiencing slowdowns during Hurricane Bonnie, Candor said planning for the expected traffic jump began last week.
In addition to adding servers and bandwidth, Candor said Accuweather made technical adjustments to its site to make it more responsive.
"It's still slow because you can only handle so much," he said.
Michael Sikillian, senior product manager of Intellicast, said traffic to the company's weather site has almost doubled. Typically, the site generates between 1 million and 1.5 million page views daily. That has grown to more than 2 million during the storm.
"It was busy all last week. We always plan for traffic to double when the weather is really bad because when weather's bad, people come to the Web or check two, three or four times as often," he said.
Intellicast features a special section where visitors can follow the progress of the hurricane through satellite images and pictures of the storm's path.
The company -- which is a subsidiary of Weather Services International, a supplier of weather information to various media outlets, airlines and other corporate customers -- also has premium packages that feature extended-range radar images and other services.
Sikillian said interest in advertising on the site picks up during storms because certain companies have products whose sales are weather dependent.
He said the site tends to draw more repeat visitors following storms, in part because the company tries especially hard to be accessible during harsh-weather periods.
Candor said it's difficult to tell what the business effects of Bonnie will be, since there was no major hurricane last year.
"Hurricanes are the biggest driver of traffic because everyone's interested in them whether they are in Kansas or the coast," he said.
The weather sections of various general news sites are also seeing boosts in traffic. A spokesman for CNN Interactive said traffic to CNN.com has approached the levels seen during last week's bombing and President Clinton's testimony. Currently, the site is recording about 250,000 hits a minute.
CNN Interactive is a unit of Time Warner Inc., which is also parent of CNNfn.com.
One thing all the sites hope to do is translate the increased traffic into more advertising dollars. To do that, analysts say site managers must become proactive.
"Any major event will drive up traffic if you have information about it. On the other hand, I think it is unlikely a particular site will be able to maintain the traffic if it's only able to tell them about the weather after people have become aware it is occurring," said Tim Sloan, director of Internet research at Aberdeen Group, a Boston-area Internet consulting firm.
"They have to become an alerting mechanism. Maybe in conjunction with travel sites, they can get into offering travel advisories. If I've booked a ticket to San Francisco tonight, they could notify me of bad weather closing in on the area," he said.
To drive interest in advertising, Sloan said sites need to queue up bookings from local and regional businesses that traditionally benefit from storms, such as auto body shops and tree surgeons.
"They could line up significant ad campaigns which would be based on the presumption that the kind of weather the company wants will happen somewhere," Sloan said.
Marc Johnson, senior analyst at New York new media research firm Jupiter Communications, believes this is a make or break time for weather sites.
"As far as the short term, one might assume they're getting more users and turning more pages which means they can serve more ads. However, there's more to it. (The Weather Channel) looks like it's turned off its ads because they want to conserve bandwidth.
"If they can deliver a good experience and be a resource, they will get users to come back and can go to advertisers and show their value," Johnson said.
Johnson believes one event, such as a major hurricane, can be enough to put weather sites on the map. Once they get in the spotlight, Johnson said, they have to make efforts to keep the traffic and go after advertisers.
--by staff writer Cyrus Afzali
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