As the 2023 NBA Finals reached their conclusion, viewers may have noticed the Ball Arena crowd inundated with people wearing shirts that had the letters “DNVR” printed across the front. These articles of clothing were not made by the team, nor were they perpetuated by a traditional apparel brand or given away by a company looking for media attention. They were produced by ALLCITY Network, a startup media venture making waves in the digital space and implicitly challenging the existing paradigm.
The streaming-first media company focused on the intersection of sports and lifestyle, has held several funding rounds and received investor-backed capital to catalyze its expansion. The platform enables sports fans to consume daily podcasts about local teams in select cities with a wide array of credible voices to appeal to the audience.
The brand refers to itself as a lifestyle company and also holds events and sells merchandise, the latter of which is, by itself, a multi-million dollar business, the second-largest driver of revenue for the company. Brandon Spano serves as the company’s chief executive officer, overseeing the development and expansion of the brand he co-founded in the mid-2010s.
“It’s incredibly important for us to have brand affinity,” Spano told BSM. “We have player ambassadors that wear our merchandise – we don’t even ask them to. You might go to a press conference one day and a player’s wearing one of our shirts or hats, and so we obviously love that.”
Throughout the calendar year, the company delivers nearly 40,000 shipments of merchandise and continues to work on bolstering its revenue in the space. Yet the largest driver of revenue comes from advertising, with six minutes of commercials encompassing a standard hour-long program.
The sector comprises 70% of ALLCITY Network’s total revenue, a steep figure because of the rapid audience expansion taking place across its conglomerate of networks. As a result, it can be an onerous task for other sources of earnings to keep up, a relatively advantageous problem to have between funding rounds.
Some professionals working in traditional areas of sports media, such as radio, television and print outlets, view ALLCITY Network and other brands akin to it as a threat. The initial premise of the business contained Denver team-specific podcasts that took place a few times per week, gradually moving to daily broadcasts as consumers craved more.
“We took it to market and sold directly against radio and RSNs and everyone else,” Spano said. “That was unique because we essentially had a podcast network that was on a traffic log that I had built that was similar to what I would build for radio, and we took our podcasts straight to market.”
Spano himself worked in sports media as a featured columnist with Bleacher Report and a contributor for NBC Sports. During that time, he began hosting his own weekend radio show on a brokered station, meaning that he paid a monthly studio fee to broadcast and solicited his own advertising revenue. His goal was to operate in the green, attaining more earnings and limiting operating costs, and he found himself particularly skilled in the practice.
Once the station moved to the FM dial and his show entered the weekday schedule, he sold more inventory and purchased other Denver media properties. He had a deluge of commercial inventory across different networks and operated in all spaces except digital, prompting the creation of BSN Denver. The website provided his clientele potential ventures in the digital space and a canvas of creativity for Spano to try and revolutionize the way sports media is consumed.
“It started as just a website, but then we launched podcasts, and then podcasts went daily the next year, and we kind of added a thing each year,” Spano said. “I went to market and sold it and created a program for it, just like I did all the other years when I was buying and selling media. To me, that idea [of] you can create anything and sell it and package it; that stayed with me forever, and so that was a constant.”
Spano claims that ALLCITY Network in Denver, known as DNVR Sports, is the largest sports network in the locale and has the most influence among local fans. Moreover, he states that more fans engage with the platform than anyone else covering the city’s sports, something that can only be done by delivering informative, entertaining and compelling content.
“This model was fully put together by 2019, we added live video in 2020 and I think by 2021 is when you saw this thing become exactly what it is now,” Spano said, “which is a daily show, in-studio for every team, every day; written content around those teams; merchandising; events [and] everything really firing on all cylinders.”
ALLCITY Network has been labeled by some as a disruptor to sports radio. Spano believes that is a “big misconception” about his brand. Previous transactions demonstrate that the aural medium in general has been evident throughout its recruiting efforts, underscored by its purchase of existing podcasts and the addition of network personalities Adam Hoge and Olin Kreutz for the CHGO Sports launch in Chicago last year. Since then, the company has raised approximately $5.3 million, adding to the total of $8.3 million that it received through venture capital and investors.
CHGO was preceded by the addition of PHNX Sports, which was unveiled in the fourth quarter of 2021 and marked the company’s first foray outside of Denver. The platform added talent such as Craig Morgan, Greg Esposito and Lindsey Smith, and has been able to capitalize off of successful seasons by the Phoenix Suns and Arizona Diamondbacks. None of the individual networks are facsimile per se, but they all helped generate a combined audience of 17 million people last quarter.
“I think there’s a lot of ways that we could help radio, but they’re so territorial and they’re so predatory that they refuse anyone’s help because old media has to own everything,” Spano said. “That’s an old media concept, and they can’t collaborate with anybody else and they have to own everything.”
When ALLCITY enters a new market, it purchases a six thousand to 10,000 square-foot office space that houses sales, production, social media and management departments. Additionally, it constructs studios on par or exceeding regional sports networks. Last month, the company launched PHLY Sports in Philadelphia, a sports market Spano believes has the potential to collect $10 million in revenue. The projection is predicated on reaching full maturity and a point within a larger goal to bring the network to cash flow positive inside of the first year.
“We don’t pay license fees; there’s no rights fees; there’s no signal cost,” Spano said. “We own our distribution, so we don’t do any marketing; we pay no marketing. Everything we do is through social media, so the model makes sense.”
The company also recently unveiled a national network featuring trusted voices in the sports media space. Its hire of Anthony Gargano, which coincided with the start of the Philadelphia network, was viewed as controversial since the sports radio host violated the non-compete clause in his contract with Beasley Media Group to ink the deal.
The former 97.5 The Fanatic host was sued by his former employer for breach of contract, but came to terms on a preliminary injunction that prohibits him from working on the PHLY Sports platform or contributing to sports media content specifically targeted to the Philadelphia marketplace, as defined by Nielsen for six months. Gargano was looking to work at both outlets simultaneously, but for now, he is restricted to the national platform while continuing his work with FOX Sports Radio and starting a sports betting podcast with Parx Casino.
“We are not trying to go wide and shallow on this, which means that we’re not trying to just have the cheapest people and spin out a million shows and try to aggregate as much of an audience as we can that isn’t very engaged,” he stated. “We’re going the opposite [way] – we want the absolute most important people in their communities when it comes to these teams, and we want to hire them full time and have them cover and create content for these teams full time to where every fan has a 24/7 touchpoint with that team through these people.”
The ALL NFL podcast, which premiered last week, also features Brian Baldinger, a former NFL offensive lineman and current host and analyst for NFL Network. ALLCITY Network’s vice president of creative content and former Nuggets reporter Adam Mares is joined by ESPN analyst and SiriusXM host Tim Legler on the ALL NBA show. For the launch of the Philadelphia network, Spano hired several former writers from The Athletic and took to the marketplace 20 total employees, all of whom are full time.
The company says it was about to hit profitability prior to the introduction of PHLY Sports and ALLCITY National. Although ALLCITY Network originally had non-compete clauses in its contracts because it was the industry-standard, Spano states that 95% of his employees entering 2024 will be at will.
“I have a real problem with this idea that these major corporations are laying off dozens, if not hundreds of people, quarter-over-quarter, and then the people that they don’t lay off, they say they cannot look for jobs or work anywhere else,” Spano affirmed. “That’s just not good business, and it’s giving sports media a bad wrap. Sports radio right now, because of those actions, is giving sports media a bad look. It’s a very dangerous game.”
Spano articulates that traditional media brands view the marketplace as being territorial, whereas ALLCITY Network is interested in forging partnerships. The brand is focused on its own growth as it plans for the future, but it is open for opportunities to collaborate and innovate in an effort to help enhance other brands as well.
“I don’t think that there’s a long runway for radio, but as far as we’re concerned, we are not trying to shorten that; we’re not trying to be divisive,” Spano said. “We would love to work with radio stations and RSNs and anybody else who wants to collaborate. We do not look at sports media, whether it’s local or national, as a territory to be won.”
With the ongoing Chapter 11 bankruptcy of Diamond Sports Group and uncertainty surrounding the future of regional sports networks, an opportunity exists for ALLCITY Network to cut through and grow. The company is focused on bringing fans as close to the game as possible through its content, something that, in the future, could include the contests themselves.
“We were in talks with multiple teams this year about being the exclusive digital broadcast partner of their audio,” Spano revealed. “We have other potential partnerships on content for digital as well. That’s something we’re really interested in.”
The key to its expansion, which Spano projects to include doubling the size of the company and launching another local market, will be bringing each city to profitability as expeditiously as possible. At the moment, DNVR achieves substantial profits and PHNX has just hit the mark with CHGO being very close. Along with working on launching a free ad-supported television (FAST) channel in the future, the company has been able to sell advertising space prior to launch. Furthermore, consumers can purchase an annual membership for $79.99 that provides discounts on merchandise and events, along with access to an exclusive Discord server.
“We’re only going to get better and better and faster and faster,” Spano said, “and maybe one day we can get to a point where we can strategically open these at profitability each time. Who knows, but that’s a central goal for us.”
Most traditional broadcasting outlets have large amounts of programming inventory they need to manage, making it difficult to prioritize the production and selling of digital content. In focusing on their core product, some brands treat digital media as a secondary means of dissemination and do not appropriate the necessary budget to catalyze growth in the space. For ALLCITY Network, the central focus remains on cultivating an optimal digital experience and remaining committed to building micro-communities through its content.
“We’ve created something for our audience,” Spano said. “We have stayed digital; we have stayed true to our brand and what we are and what’s important to us. If other people change because of that or view that as a threat, that’s on them, but we have never tried to intentionally create something that either mimics or beats something else.”
The company sells a combined audience number based on engagement both on aural and visual platforms. Within its Chicago market, for example, Spano’s company touts a combined audience surpassing 1 million people per month. The brand also garners recognition and engagement through other sectors of its business.
“We should be working together; we should be making content together [and] we should be doing simulcasts and having our sales teams work together,” Spano said. “That’s what the message should be instead of them just holding on to their cash and trying to hope we go out of business before they do.”
ALLCITY wants to root itself as a cultural pillar within marketplaces. It has a strategy for raising capital that it will certainly need to infuse within given areas to attain that goal. Continuing to gear itself towards attaining cash flow positive while augmenting its cost per thousand impressions (CPM) metric is salient towards reaching sustainability. The company is not fixated on conquering traditional media; rather it is presenting itself as another option accessible to consumers through a variety of platforms.
“When we launch a market inside of a city, we’re not saying, ‘This is the new Bulls podcast in Chicago,’” Spano explained. “We’re saying, ‘This is CHGO – it’s your new sports network, and if you’d like to watch this postgame show instead of NBC [Sports] Chicago, you certainly can. If you’d like to listen to this Bears show instead of The Score, you certainly can.’”
Being able to prevent the effort from resulting in an evanescent run will require persistence and determination to keep the company on its upward trajectory. After all, it operated its inaugural DNVR Sports network for five years without any venture capital and had to do everything on its own. ALLCITY Network has discovered a formula to be able to monetize its content while minimizing its burn, a concept that is not going to change just because it has raised capital.
“We are no longer in a world where you can just carry a company for years that doesn’t generate profit,” Spano said. “The market demands that there is a path to profitability. We’ve proven that there is.”
ALLCITY Network will engage in another funding round at a point to be determined. Depending on its performance over the next 18 months, the company will adjust its allocations into growth accordingly. The immediate task at hand is earning more sales for PHLY Sports and ALLCITY National while continuing to build and maintain relationships across its other properties.
“Without sharing sales numbers, we would hope that if we do our jobs right, that we would be valued at well over $100 million next time that we raise money,” Spano said. “We have a lot of work to do.”
Derek Futterman is a contributing editor and sports media reporter for Barrett Media. Additionally, he has worked in a broad array of roles in multimedia production – including on live game broadcasts and audiovisual platforms – and in digital content development and management. He previously interned for Paramount within Showtime Networks, wrote for the Long Island Herald and served as lead sports producer at NY2C. To get in touch, find him on X @derekfutterman.
