According to Red Herring, Landmark Communications, the owner of The Weather Channel and all of its associated properties, is putting its Weather Channel assets on the auction block. The article referenced a $5 billion price tag that was suggested to Landmark Vice Chairman, Richard Barry.

I believe one of the best assets of The Weather Channel is their domain name, Weather.com. People don’t necessarily navigate to Weather.com to specifically visit The Weather Channel. They navigate to that domain name to get a weather forecast, and as long as its accurate, the provider of the forecast isn’t important. This is a category killer domain name, and it draws tremendous traffic.

According to Nielson/NetRatings reported in Financial Post, Weather.com received almost 33 million unique page views last November, which is more traffic than Facebook or CNN received that month. Additionally, millions of people look at Weather Channel widgets found on independent websites every month.

This is all positive for Landmark, and I would think several global companies would be interested in acquiring The Weather Channel portfolio.

The New York Post had an article the other day about the plane crash that Travis Barker and DJ AM survived. As a result of the crash, lawsuits were filed against everyone from the estates of the pilots, aircraft manufacturer, tire company, and flight brokers. Just about everyone who had a hand in planning or executing the flight was probably named in the lawsuit.

One tidbit I noticed was from Clay Aviation, which said they didn’t operate the plane that crashed, but were the brokers for the flight.  That got me thinking about our affiliate websites and potential liability if something happens.  We live in a litigation-happy country.  People file or threaten lawsuits for anything and everything, and our websites could be exposed to even greater risk when offering products or services administered by other companies.

It’s important that website owners and operators evaluate the risk of offering other company’s products and services, and they need to take steps to mitigate the potential risk. Whether you would be liable for any part of an airplane crash that was booked on your site or not is something a court would ultimately decide. You need to be able to finance a defense, because it could be easy to be added to a large lawsuit.