Why Amazon’s Cloud Business Promotes The Weather Channel

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jun 16, 6:53AM EDT

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Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud enterprise service owned by the huge online retailer, promotes it relationship with The Weather Channel. Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) could pick from scores of other customers, but The Weather Channel is among the leaders of its cloud promotions. There are two reasons for the choice. The first is that The Weather Channel has almost universal public recognition. The second is that its traffic and user inquiries are so substantial that companies looking for cloud computing are bound to be impressed.

In the Amazon cloud promotion, it lets The Weather Channel’s management speak for themselves. The Weather Company’s Chief Information & Technology Officer Bryson Keohler narrates a four-minute video in which he talks about the how “The Weather Company Delivers 15 Billion Forecasts per Day Using AWS.” He goes on to describe why AWS works so well, but in language any non-technical person could understand. That is the pitch to cloud customers.

However, Amazon has been more clever than posting a video. According to Internet research firm comScore, The Weather Company, which owns The Weather Channel sites, reached 92 million unique visitors last month, which places it 19th among all U.S. sites based on traffic. The figure includes both desktop and mobile. And the number puts it just shy of ESPN and Twitter Inc. (NYSE: TWTR) when they are measured on the same basis.

The Amazon promotion program competes with another from Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT), the Azure Cloud service. In Microsoft’s case, it promotes another famous weather site: Accuweather. Azure allows Accuweather to process 10 billion requests for data per day. Since the basis of the measurement is different from Amazon’s, it is hard to tell whether Microsoft or Amazon handles more requests or traffic. In either case, billions of anything are impressive. Microsoft also has used a household name in the weather sector, probably for the same reasons Amazon has.

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In Microsoft’s case, the assurance of Azure’s competence is provided by Accuweather VP of Technology Chris Patti, who probably has credentials similar to Keohler’s.

Azure and AWS each work well, certainly. It is hurricane season, and tornadoes are ripping up America’s mid-section. Think of all the people online who want to get the weather but do not care a bit about the cloud.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.