Interactive advertising and marketing firm Real Media served more than 1 billion ads to weather portal Weather.com during the week ending March 5, Real Media said yesterday.
The New York-based company said that on March 5 alone, it served more than 382 million ads to Weather.com during the “Storm Of The Century That Wasn't,” a day when weather forecasters were predicting record snow for the Northeast. The storm turned out to be much less than predicted.
Real Media said Weather.com switched its ad serving technology last year from DoubleClick's AdServer to Real Media's Open AdStream. The company said the portal switched because it found that DoubleClick's technology could not scale fast enough when emergency weather conditions increased traffic on the Web site.
“Our site sees fast turnaround in terms of both content and advertising,” said Tim Messier, Weather.com's ad technology manager. “We never miss a weather event and as a result, our site's traffic can spike to several hundred times its normal levels.”
