IMD, Skymet and Weather Express see jump in traffic on their websites due to drought fears

NEW DELHI: The weather office and private weather forecasters from Skymet to Weather Express are seeing a jump in traffic on their websites, apart from increase user base of their mobile apps. Simultaneously, they expect revenues to increase with a rising number of clients who are hungry for clues about the monsoon this season.

Aviation, energy, insurance, banking, agriculture, traders remain the key growth drivers which are looking for news and weather forecasts they say.However, companies in logistics, chemicals and commodities are also looking for weather products.

The India Meteorological department continues to see a huge traffic in the month of June, similar to the previous year. From June 1-16, it had over 5.76 visitors on its page this year, which is expected to cross 10 lakh by the month end say officials. Private weather forecaster such as Kolkata based Weather Express and Noida based Skymet have also seen a rush of people on their websites, seeing a growth of 35 per cent and 600 per cent respectively in the past one month.

"The fear of a second year consecutive drought and a stronger information flow in various media is attributed to the increase in number of users assessing weather site early this month," says Manav Singh Gahlout, chief digital media, Skymet which has clients from ITC to Indian Oil.

Skymet saw a 600 per cent increase in page views and the number of users accessing their web site since March. "Over a million users come to our websites for weather information and on an average I get about 13-16 million page hits. The average time spend by visitors is 2.5-3 minutes," he says.

The greater the traffic, the higher the advertising revenues. Each click on the advertisement on the website earns the companies anywhere around 8 cents to $2.

Weather Express, which has a client base that includes private players like Pepsico, Bayer, Syngenta to the West Bengal and Maharashtra government says that the 35 per cent growth was seen in phone application that update uses on the weather forecast.