The Weather Channel's Secret: Less Weather, More Clickbait | Hacker News Reader

The Weather Channel's Secret: Less Weather, More Clickbait

businessweek.com

32 pointscryptoz28 comments

I don't understand why anyone would get their forecasts from anywhere but the NOAA website. The US government provides free, (adfree) and detailed forecasts which are more accurate than 3rd party forecasts. Most 3rd party forecast sites artificially inflate the chance of rain and other factors (because a false negative is better than a false positive, in regards to rain). The NOAA forecasts do not have this "fake" adjustment in them and are very accurate. NOAA forecasts also come with the forecast discussion, written by the Meteorologists which explain the current forecast in a detailed, meteorological way.

http://www.weather.gov/

My favorite feature of weather.gov is more or less stable deep linking. So I can deep link to my local weather and by local forecast discussion.

This would be a disaster for a clickbait supplier but is awesome for end users.

I like the weather channel's hourly weather forecast. clean, simple and runs on desktop and mobile. Also fairly accurate - will i need an umbrella by the time my evening commute hits? by the time i am coming home from dinner, etc? And I can link right to it.

http://www.weather.com/weather/hourbyhour/graph/10011

I've found wunderground.com to be the perfect combination of clarity and high-density information. There are no click-bait "related" links there.

I also prefer their website on desktop, but it is perpetually annoying to me that you have to pay a yearly subscription to make ads go away in their Android app.

To WU: I will pay whatever you want, just make it one-time.

My guess is most people go with the first search result for weather + zip code which is usually weather.com.

I think you're right historically, and people built up patterns from what used to be the case.

On Google or Bing now though, such a search just returns the forecast directly, without requiring a clickthrough.

I'd be surprised if weather.com or even wunderground aren't the first casualties of the trend towards smarter search engines.

>> I don't understand why anyone would get their forecasts from anywhere but the NOAA website.

One obvious reason is that many people follow the weather in regions other than those covered by that service.

I suspect the answer has something to do with web design. weather.com has got swarms of designers being paid to make people click on things while weather.gov will only appeal to folks who eschew such things.

Also, as a red-green colorblind person I can't make any sense of weather.gov's maps.

Let's not forget when The Weather Channel lobbied to make this NWS information unavailable to the general public, and only distributed to approved providers like itself!

I'm mistaken-- it was actually AccuWeather.

One problem I've always had with weather.gov is the radar maps just display the raw data from each ground station. Their system doesn't attempt to fill in missing coverage from neighboring radar sites.

So it often looks like the edge of a storm is just a few dozen miles away, when in reality the storm continues for hundreds of miles (far beyond the coverage of the current radar station).

As an example: http://radar.weather.gov/radar.php?rid=atx&product=N0R&overl...

This storm (assuming you're looking at this shortly after my comment was posted) continues down the entire northwest US coast into Oregon and Northern California. But here it looks like it's contained entirely within Washington state.

You're only looking at Washington, what do you expect. Here is the entire country.

http://radar.weather.gov/Conus/full_loop.php

I'd expect either (a) an indication of how far the radar's range is, or (b) data fill from nearby stations so that that the entire visible map has radar data.

Pretty much all other weather sites go with option (b).

I stopped getting my weather from The Weather Channel a long time ago, when they became more interested in click-bait articles over just reporting the weather. Thankfully today we have many alternatives:

http://www.wunderground.com/ http://darkskyapp.com/ http://forecast.io/

And of course http://www.weather.gov/, to name a few.

The Weather Channel purchased Weather Underground in 2012. WU doesn't push the sensational stories on their weather pages, but their "News" section is just as much of a joke now.

Well as I still see a giant map of my current area and the weather, and all news stories are below the fold, so it still works. As soon as that changes I'll be looking elsewhere I'm sure.

The worst leakage is when the winter storm names start showing up in the winter.

I didn't realize that. I guess I need to change weather providers again. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Weather_Channel

The Weather Company (TWCC Holdings:[1] consortium owned by NBCUniversal (25%),[2][3] The Blackstone Group, Bain Capital,[4] exact Bain and Blackstone percentages unknown)

NBCUniversal being Comcast of course.

Thank you for the information.

Fortunately, the weather aspect of Wunderground hasn't been adversely affected by the purchase. It appears that TWC treats Wunderground as a separate property. They have allowed some level of autonomy. The extra funding has dramatically improved their web presence. Basically Wunderground is TWC's web property that targets weather geeks.

If you are like me and just want to see the raw data in a user-friendly and customizable way without a bunch of pointless graphics or text descriptions, there is also http://weatherspark.com/

It would be great if there was as TV channel that only covered the weather. Then when I am getting dressed I could have the box on, get the report, and be ready for my day.

I don't want "news", I don't want Ice Road Truckers. I want weather. There's money to be made in that model, it seems to me.

Dark Sky is the best

The Weather Channel is one of the WORST offenders for clickbait ads. The whole website reminds me of a poorly designed spam wordpress site complete with 'has science gone TOO FAR? CLICK HERE!' ads.

http://weatherspark.com is the only weather site i hit anymore, its fabulous, putting hourlies in graph form makes the data very easy to digest, i can't recommend it enough

The page's <title> is "Weather Channel's Web, Mobile Growth Leads to Advertising Insights - Businessweek". Ditto for the slug in the URL.

Looks like Businessweek is the pot calling the kettle black.

Not exactly a secret

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