When The Weather Channel launched a new version of their iPad app in October, we wrote about how they’re the “largest location-based services company in the world.” The Weather Channel was just honored by “Advertiser Perceptions” for the work they’re doing in the mobile space. Their monthly audience is a whopping 163 million monthly unique visitors, and when you take a look at the major features within the apps that they can serve ads on, you begin to see clear picture of social TV that’s making money. While The Weather Channel provides essential information (like how cold it’s going to be) on top of their talk shows and originals, they’ve still proven that mobile ads can work across social elements within their mobile platforms.
Since The Weather Channel rolled out a major Twitter integration, both tweets and their own social weather platform iWitness have become major features within their iPhone and iPad apps. On their iPhone app, both the “social” and “iWitness” areas have ads running on top of them as does the “news” feature of their iPad app, which combines the social and iWitness components in tappable boxes. Also, Apple just announced that The Weather Channel is Apple’s #2 iPad and #5 iPhone app as part of a big countdown their doing to 25 billion apps.
The reason The Weather Channel is now getting recognition for how valuable these ad buys have been is because they’ve recognized that linear TV is only one place for them to share weather information. When it comes to incorporating social TV into mobile networks, all you need to be thinking about is, what kind of real-time information can we put in the palms of people’s hands that they can’t live without?