The Weather Channel truly is a success story:
"Reaching 70 million homes and offering programming that may cost less to produce than almost anything else this side of C-SPAN, the Weather Channel is "a cash machine," in the estimation of Jessica Reif, a media analyst at Merrill Lynch.
The financial figures are not reported, because the channel is privately held, owned by Landmark Communications, a family-controlled company in Norfolk, Va., whose other media holdings include The Virginian-Pilot, The Roanoke Times, KLAS-TV in Las Vegas, and WTVF-TV in Nashville, Tenn.
But a person familiar with its finances said that the Weather Channel generated about $100 million in operating profits in 1998 on revenue of $200 million that came primarily from advertising, as well as from fees paid by cable operators. With a remarkably high profit margin of some 50 percent, the service could probably attract a buyer willing to pay as much at 15 times cash flow, or about $1.65 billion, according to Derek Baine, a cable analyst at Paul Kagan Associations, the media consulting firm."
Now, if they would only tell us more about the female meteorologists.<g>
nytimes.com
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