Though the company recently doubled its Ann Arbor office space on North Fifth Avenue, only five employees are based here, including Masters and co-founder Jeff Ferguson, a U-M computer science grad. The Weather Underground also has the world’s largest network of “backyard” personal weather stations-more than 10,000 (the six in Ann Arbor include one at Leslie Park Golf Course and one at Loch Alpine)-plus more than a million user-posted weather photos and more than 1,000 webcams. Hundreds of users, ranging from professional meteorologists to amateur hobbyists, contribute their own blogs. So is Masters’ own blog, a fascinating and readable account of the weather topics of the day. Masters says the site’s radar scans, which can be set in motion to track the direction in which storms are moving, are a big draw. In January, Quantcast rated the fifty-seventh-largest site on the web, with 17 million unique visitors in the previous month. Yet today the site employs thirty-seven people and ranks second only to the Weather Channel’s in traffic. “I figured maybe we’d have ten people a decade into the future and would run out of things to put on the website,” admits the unassuming Masters, one of four U-M grads who run the company. When Jeff Masters helped launch the Weather Underground as a private company in 1995, he never dreamed it would become the second-biggest weather resource in the country. A U-M spin-off named after a radical sixties group is an unlikely capitalist success story.
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