Weather.com goes for the Gold
Today I tripped over an offer from Weather.com for a personalized weather report called weather.com €œgold€.
For $19.95, weather.com gold will get you more speed for downloading radar maps, the ability to customize €œyour€ weather page and add your exact location (house or office) to the radar maps; view weather in 11 other cities of your choice and get all of this "ad free." With this offering, weather.com begins its push into the content subscription business.
Like newspapers and other content providers, weather.com hopes that faster, richer and more personalized content will be enough to move visitors from a free ad-supported model to a subscription model. This move by weather.com may also suggest that they€™ve had little ability to add more advertising inventory.
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I wouldn't pay for this. When I want the weather, I just want the five-day forecast for where I am or where I'm going. Sure, there are some weather fetishists out there. But they're the teeny-tiny minority. And now that Google has the four/five-day forecast, courtesy of a deal with the Weather Underground, I don't need to visit Weather.com at all.
This illustrates the problem of moving from an ad-supported model to a paid-content model when there are myriad alternative sources of the same information in the marketplace.