"We went along for the ride every single step of the way [with Facebook]... But we noticed, over the course of two years, that we were being paid in all types of currencies — followers, shares, views — that did not feel like money."
>“It has been good for Facebook, but it hasn’t been good for us.”
I hear this more and more from my friends in publishing and broadcasting. Sales likes to brag about "followers" and such, but it never translates into real money.
This isn't just a problem with facebook, but with marketing in general. People care about a lot of metrics (e.g., media metrics such as positive/negative buzz) that don't make a jot of difference to the top line of a company, and make a difference to the bottom line only because of the amount of money spent on trying to move them[1].
[1] Of course, there are exceptions: arguably Ratners jewellers in the UK would be an example.
I sat in a meeting where the VP of marketing was touting the rate of users who viewed the entire YouTube ad for some new ads we put out, as opposed to users skipping the ads. This was a huge success, VP and CEO repeated this great news for a good year.
Almost every ad was below the threshold where YouTube would put up the "skip" option at that time, so users really had no choice but to watch it all. "Success" was guaranteed purely based on the length of the ads.
No effort was made to actually tie anything to sales, money of any sort, except MOAR marketing staff and budget... hiring freeze for tech support and so on...
Sounds like it was a terrific success based on the metric tested. They wanted viewers to see the entire ad, and making a shorter ad guaranteed that...
Video advertising doesn't generally trigger an immediate call to action; it's always been a tool of brand awareness, so why would you want to have a longer ad if most users simply skip over it?
It was a success based on the metric. It also could not have had any other result than success based on the % of ads that could not be skipped. There was no other possible outcome.
There's a confusion and conflation of terminology here, even if the original meaning can stand on its own too.
The Weather Channel isn't an advertiser here. They're a user -- a corporate one, but they supply content they want others to view. Facebook has scaled back the organic effectiveness of creator-owned pages in an effort to drive more traffic to paid advertising. The Weather Channel is simply noticing that they're giving away content for free, and whatever benefit they derive from this content on this particular medium doesn't make up for how much it costs to produce.
Is it really a bait-and-switch? Advertisers can be pretty scientific about their use of FB. It’s standard practice to balance the amount made from acquired users against their cost of acquisition.
Facebook needs to start treating their video platform more like a YouTube competitor, that pays content-creators real dollars.
If they stay on this path where they try to force all consumers and creators to be on their platform without incentivizing, people will eventually get upset enough to leave.
One of the major Danish news papers is e perimenting with not using Facebook. So far their visitor count is diwn, but by less than they expected and the visitors they get spend more time and more money, so it’s looking like a win win.
Ironically you can still share their articles on Facebook by clicking the big blue Facebook button at the top of an article, but hey it’s a start at least.
> The Weather Channel found it was only making $28 per minute of video produced. For comparison, Katz pointed out how the CBS reality show “Survivor” cost $45,000 per minute to make in 2009.
Can they make up for it by hosting the content themselves, combined with advertising?
I'm surprised that with 500 millions followers on facebook they were not able to grow some revenue. Plenty facebook broadcasters make 6 figures with way less followers by doing product placement or by sharing other channels contents for a fee. Was the Weather Channel forbidden to do these kinds of partnerships and if not why didn't hey do some?
> Was the Weather Channel forbidden to do these kinds of partnerships and if not why didn't hey do some?
They probably didn't reshare anything because they are already a part of NBC Universal. Thus, they already have other sources of funding that would dwarf anything that product placement or paid placements could achieve.
Keep in mind that video itself is ultimately TWC's main product, not whatever they post on Facebook. As long as they can broadcast their video somewhere, they will be okay.
There's also the clickbait issue. Pages that begin to repost as a revenue generator face a death spiral down to clickbait posts. TWC probably wanted to cut it off before such a thing ruined their brand.
>There's also the clickbait issue. Pages that begin to repost as a revenue generator face a death spiral down to clickbait posts. TWC probably wanted to cut it off before such a thing ruined their brand.
There's already a lot of clickbait on weather.com.
>Runaway Boat Sucked Into Dam, But the End is the Best Part
>Is Your Home's Electricity Safe? 5 Things to Check
>6 Tips To Allergy-Proof Your Home For Spring
There's also an article with this[0] image and the title "Odds of Development Increasing - here's what we know".
These all have a CSS class "js-sponsored-title", so there probably is some kind of kickback installed
ive never cared much for the weather channel. After the whole snafu about their own pet names for winter storms I think they lost a good deal of credibility as anything more than a paid wrapper for noaa.gov.
wttr.in is a good service you can get on nearly any device.
>wttr.in is a good service you can get on nearly any device.
wttr.in isn't going to show me live video of my friends being rescued from a storm 2,000 miles away, like The Weather Channel did.
I use it daily, but it only regurgitates NWS data, and data that's pretty vague for a vast area at that.
There's a location about 20 miles from where I am now that is routinely 40 degrees cooler than where I am now because of altitude change. My home location is always 5-15 degrees cooler than my work location. The Weather Channel shows that. wttr.in doesn't.
I'm a long distance trucker (my 6th career), and I'd like an app or site that will give me weather over two or three days along a 1000 to 2000 mile path. Anyone?
IIRC, I found something somewhere under weather.gov, but it was difficult/tedious to use on a smallish android phone; the associated API seemed more promising, but for the moment I'm either driving, decompressing or sleeping.
Thanks. Google play doesn't seem to be able to find it, not by a search, and not by the link from their web page. I tried getting weather from their web page for a trip I'm starting soon, but I just got a "this is embarrassing" response.
But, google play suggested other apps, so I'll try them. I appreciate your pointer.
My dad is a farmer, and uses DTN for weather information. It's a paid service, not 100% sure of the price, but it provides excellent weather information. I see they offer a product tailored for transportation:
https://www.dtn.com/industries/weather/transportation/
Their mobile site isn't the greatest, but it is usable. I've used it for trip forecasts before, it works well.
Edit:one great thing is no ads, weather.com is unusable w/o an ad blocker, but this being a monthly payment=no ads to deal with.
Second recommendation for DTN. I know people who run small town radio stations who use it because they can't afford the other big commercial services. They all say it's great.
when you ask for, e.g, "/springfield", how do you know which Springfield you get? And how to you specify a particular Springfield out of the many?
Edit: By using '~' to use the search/lookup feature, and adding the state to be specific. The '~' will cause a line below the weather to appear, telling you where it found.
$ curl wttr.in/~denver+iowa
[weather stuff]
Location: Denver, Bremer County, Iowa, 50622, United States of America [42.6713719,-92.3374045]
> whole snafu about their own pet names for winter storms
Funny because my next thought was "Heartbleed, Spectre, Shellshock, ...". It seems people will discuss threats more when there are catchy names attached to them. Otherwise "mitigated CVE-XYZ" or "that storm was wicked, eh?" is just another boring day at the office.
Sounds very similar to Disney wanting to go alone and pull out of Netflix. Content creation is expensive and digital platforms either need to create their own stuff or pay up.
Funny story regarding The Weather Channel back in the day when cable television was the new thing in the UK.
Two networks doing just weather launched at approximately the same time - The Weather Network and The Weather Channel. The Weather Network sold to the many cable operators that existed then (before they merged into what would eventually be rebranded into Virgin Media) and The Weather Channel paid to be on Sky - essentially a satellite operation.
The Weather Network had boxes in the cable head ends that did local weather inserts, all done by computer with some music, glorified 'pages from ceefax' mixed in with presentations from the studio for weather in the UK and internationally. The Weather Channel had no localisation.
The Weather Network offered a legit service, who doesn't want to find out what the weather is from their TV? Particularly if it does have the local details. This could be done on a budget as the partners that setup the company already had the data from forecasting for airports etc. as well as the fairly simple boxes for the cable head ends. The product sold itself and never had ambitions to be competing with the big shows on the BBC for eyeballs. It was a simple service that did what it said on the tin.
Meanwhile, The Weather Channel paid top dollar for presenters, paid to be on Sky and had quite a lot of people marketing the service. So adverts were paid for in newspapers, on the Tube trains and elsewhere. They had left the product behind so they decided to buy The Weather Network and use that tech.
So the companies merged and still the marketing hubris ruled the roost. The people with clipboards and power suits were in control, hiring more minions and interns. At The Weather Network there were none of those people, the forecasters ruled the show and the presenters invariably had a background in meteorology, gained from working in the Royal Navy or with a decent degree from Reading University (the place for meteorology).
Then, one day, boss man from The Weather Channel came over from the USA. Realising that the lunatics had taken over the asylum he decided to close the whole lot down. That was the end of that, plug pulled.
The better presenters actually made good careers for themselves because the BBC had launched News 24 and needed weather presenters. So these guys got lucky and no longer had to work for the marketing people. They could actually do weather (which is more like betting on horses than anything scientific - you read the 'form' and place your bets).
Not sure what happened to the marketing folk but I am sure they have lots to say about themselves on LinkedIn.
What was unfair in the UK market was the government. In the USA if the taxpayer pays for something then it is free for the citizens to use. In the UK with the Conservative government the idea was for the Met Office to compete, giving them a huge advantage over genuine private enterprise.
This also happens more generally with the BBC. How can anyone operate a news website when the BBC do a pretty good one for free, with no adverts? It is not fair.
Anyway, I am pleased to hear that The Weather Channel are again prepared to pull the plug on lousy business propositions after giving a bit of time for things to run their course. It keeps them innovating (even if they are under different ownership now).
Can I take this opportunity to complain about how poor the http://weather.com search autocomplete is? "Princeton" doesn't list New Jersey, and "France" has no results in France.
