Broadcast.com Boosts Its Signal

"In traditional media, you play to numbers," Cuban says. "We play to passions. We just put up a scuba-diving show, and it's taking off. People who are passionate about scuba diving find that show."

Wagner describes the new medium this way: "This is cable on steroids. This is not 50 or 500 channels. This is 5,000 channels."

But it's 5,000 channels with a difference - and that difference reflects a second key element in the broadcast.com model. TV and radio are bounded by some combination of time and distance. If you live outside New York City, you can't hear many of the radio programs that New Yorkers live by. If you're not home at 11:30 p.m. (EST), you can't watch "The Tonight Show" - unless you set your VCR in advance. Broadcast.com obliterates those barriers. On the Web, you can listen to New York radio, no matter where you live. And you can experience events whenever you'd like.

"We reach people where they are," Cuban says. "We reach more white-collar office workers during business hours than ABC, NBC, and CBS combined. Why? Few of these people have radios or TVs on their desks. But they all have computers."

Broadcast.com's peak-usage period is on weekdays between10 a.m. and 4 p.m. - prime time for knowledge workers logging on from work. Which is why big-name companies now pay Wagner and Cuban to broadcast announcements, product releases, and seminars to employees, customers, suppliers, and reporters. Such "business services" are the fastest-growing segment of broadcast.com's market. Sure, people are passionate about listening to sports. But companies are just as passionate about talking up their businesses.

Wagner and Cuban could not have seized this market without the third component of their model: Always be selling. "Sales is king," Cuban declares. "Sales is everything." Indeed, Cuban is a sales fanatic. Today about 60 of broadcast.com's 195 employees are salespeople. Cuban wants the company to have 100 salespeople by the end of 1998 and 200 by the end of 1999. He argues that sales - a blind spot at most Web companies - is a core competence at broadcast.com. "We want to build the most extensive sales force in our industry," he says. "When I'm evaluating an Internet company, the first question I ask is, How many salespeople do you have?"

Why is Cuban sold on sales? It goes back to the "sprint." The fastest way to block others from entering your market is to strike exclusive deals for programming and distribution. Today Wagner and Cuban control the rights to Web broadcasts of Major League Baseball, NCAA basketball, and NHL hockey. They have Web rights to continuous feeds from more than 310 radio stations. Acquiring those rights means striking lots of deals. And striking lots of deals requires lots of salespeople.

A top-flight sales force offers a second advantage: It lets a company respond quickly to unexpected opportunities. And on the Web, the biggest opportunities often come out of nowhere. It took Wagner and Cuban some time to embrace the market for business services. But once they did, broadcast.com was able to turn on a dime.

"If we didn't have a great sales force," Cuban says, "we couldn't have seized the opportunity. It was time to refocus. And we did."

Today broadcast.com is the 11th busiest news-and-entertainment site on the Web. It generates revenue in a variety of ways. Radio stations give broadcast.com the right to sell a few minutes' worth of over-the-air advertising per day; Wagner and Cuban bundle this air time into national ad packages. Its Web advertisers, who can buy traditional or multimedia banner ads, or special "audio tags," range from Citibank to IBM to Ford Motor Co. Its business-service customers, who pay broadcast.com to distribute their content, include Microsoft, CNN, and Dell. The company has grown fast. There's talk of an IPO. But there's no talk of slowing down.

"On the Web," says Cuban, "the people who think they've won are the ones who lose." Wagner agrees: "You can't even think about slowing down. You never know who's going to be gaining on you."