The Weather Channel’s website is taking a cue from sites like Upworthy, using click-baiting techniques to drive traffic:
The traffic monitor Alexa ranks weather.com the 28th-most visited website in the United States, above Yelp, nytimes.com, and the highest-ranking pornography site. Roughly four in five of the site’s visits come from people interested in the forecast. But for the past year or so, the website has worked to keep the forecast-checkers there for original, vaguely weather-related media. … And so, over the past year, the non-forecasting part of weather.com underwent a drastic overhaul. That section of the site is now comprised primarily of original, “shareable” content advertised with Upworthy-style headlines, which maximize traffic by attracting clicks and jibing with Facebook’s Newsfeed algorithm. In 2012, according to [weather.com editor-in-chief Neil] Katz, the copy in this part of the site was roughly 80 percent wire and 20 percent original; over the past year, that ratio has been reversed, with an endless stream of wire photographs replaced by original images taken by more than 100 photographers around the world. The site’s newsroom exceeds 40 journalists, most of them hired since December 2012, from outlets including The Daily Beast, Huffington Post, and Everyday Health.
The change has been successful. The non-forecasting content on weather.com more than doubled its page views in 2013, from about 1.2 billion to about 2.5 billion, according to internal numbers. (The site still receives the vast majority of its overall page views—about 13 billion total in 2013, according to comScore, averaging 54 million unique visitors per month—from people checking the forecasts.)
The Dish 