I have a predication. In fact, it is a prediction about the future of weather forecasts. No, I am not a weather man–although I like to think that I am sometimes am more accurate than some of the weather forecasters in my area. So, what’s my prediction? Your weather, or how you get your weather, is going to become more social in nature (no pun intended). Why? The Weather Channel looks to be planning some sort of push towards making how we get our weather more social.
The Weather Channel recently purchased a whole slew of domain names related to social activities, or social weather:
howsurweather.com
socialeyesweather.com
socialforcast.com
socialweatherhood.com
theweatherchannelsocial.com
ursocialweather.com
weathersocialeyes.com
weathersocialhood.com
wxsocial.com
It looks to me like The Weather Channel has a plan for these–especially considering the fact that The Weather Channel has not registered any new domain names since I started tracking domain name registrations by certain organizations.
What I find rather odd, though, is that many of these domain names are misspellings (e.g., ursocialweather.com versus yoursocialweather.com) or, in fact, some of the domain names that I would consider to be “better” domains are already registered (e.g., howsyourweather.com).
The Weather Channel has some options when it comes to those other domain names that are similar to the domain names that they registered:
— They could make an offer and try to purchase those domain names from the current owners. If they did that, though, I would suspect that it would be better to try to purchase them not using their own organization’s name (which would most likely bring the price up).
— They could secure the trademark: owning the trademark will almost always assure you that you can recover the associated domain name. A UDRP may need to be filed, though.
Whatever the case, The Weather Channel has secured some new domain names related to social activities and how we consume the weather (how we get our weather forecast). I personally don’t think any of these are very “brandable”, although the use of “social eyes” and “social hood” is an interesting concept.
I reached out to the PR Team over at The Weather Channel, and they commented: “just being smart and strategic about our business in an increasingly competitive marketplace”.