On a playoff night in Denver, the most revealing ALLCITY Network program is not quite a podcast and not quite television. Four hosts sit upstairs from a sports bar, watching the Nuggets with thousands of people online. Downstairs, fans watch the same game beneath the studio. A good shot produces three reactions at once: the players celebrate at the arena, the hosts shout into their microphones, and the bar answers from below. The feedback loop is architectural.
This is ALLCITY's business in miniature. The Denver company runs daily, team-specific shows in five markets: DNVR, PHNX, CHGO, PHLY, and DLLS. It publishes video, podcasts, articles, newsletters, and social clips. But media is only the entry point. The company also sells memberships, original apparel, live events, tailgates, premium guides, and advertising packages. The fans are the customers; brands that want to reach those fans are customers too.
What it does not own is just as important: live game rights. ALLCITY works around the expensive center of sports broadcasting. It specializes in anticipation and aftermath - the preview, the instant reaction, the argument, the joke that survives into tomorrow's group chat. It sells the feeling of having clever friends who care about the same team and are always awake when news breaks.
The founder learned media by paying the bill
Brandon Spano did not arrive through the usual founder door. He hosted a brokered radio show in Denver, which meant he paid the station for airtime and then sold his own commercials. The monthly studio fee was wonderfully clarifying. If the ads did not cover the slot, the show was not an expression of personal brand. It was a loss.
Spano eventually bought inventory across radio, television, and print, but lacked a digital property to offer his clients. In 2015 he and Ryan Koenigsberg started BSN Denver - yes, Brandon Spano Network - with six full-time people covering six local teams. It began as a website. Team podcasts followed in 2016, moved from a few episodes a week to daily, and built enough listenership for Spano to take an SBA loan in 2017 for better equipment and a larger office. A paywall converted a few thousand readers into subscribers.
The stack assembled one layer at a time: written coverage, daily audio, subscriptions, merchandise, events, and finally live video in 2020. BSN became DNVR in 2019. By 2021 the basic unit was recognizable: a studio show for every important team, every weekday, with reporting and commerce orbiting it.
“Culture and community are the biggest staples of what we do, so this is the center of our universe.”Brandon Spano, on the DNVR Bar
Four cash registers, one relationship
A conventional local outlet asks one question: how many people saw the ad? ALLCITY asks what else a trusted daily audience might do. A listener can become a member. A member can buy a shirt. A shirt-wearing fan can attend a tailgate. The tailgate can carry a sponsor. None of this is exotic, but the pieces reinforce one another unusually well.
Daily media
Team-specific shows create frequency, personality, and a reliable place to react.
Advertising
Hosts translate local trust into direct-sold, embedded, and sponsored inventory.
Membership
Diehards pay for premium products, community access, and useful discounts.
Belonging
Merchandise and events turn a private listening habit into a visible social identity.
In 2023, Spano said advertising supplied roughly 70 percent of revenue, with merchandise the second-largest driver. The company was shipping nearly 40,000 merch orders a year. Three years earlier, the mix had been more balanced - roughly half advertising, 30 percent membership, and 20 percent merchandise. The shift makes sense: audience growth lets ad sales expand faster than subscriptions, even when every other line keeps growing.
Advertising became the loudest cash register
The bar provided an especially tidy demonstration of the model. In 2020, Little Pub Company licensed the DNVR name for a struggling Colfax Avenue location. The operator handled food and drink; DNVR kept its merchandise and membership economics, gained rent-free office and studio space upstairs, and got a permanent place for watch parties. The digital publisher entered hospitality without paying for the buildout. Years later, the bar operation changed hands and now sits with Spano's wife, but the strategic idea remains: put a front door on the internet.
Scale the plumbing, not the accent
ALLCITY's differentiation lives in an apparent contradiction. It wants national scale without sounding national. The city brands use the same operating machinery - sales, finance, technology, distribution, commerce - while the programming remains stubbornly local. DNVR is not an ALLCITY Denver vertical. It is DNVR. The same goes for PHNX, CHGO, PHLY, and DLLS. The vowel-removal system makes them siblings, not clones.
That design puts ALLCITY between several markets. It competes with sports radio for daily habit, regional sports networks for postgame attention, newspaper desks and The Athletic for authority, and independent YouTube hosts for personality. Its pitch to fans is depth plus company. Its pitch to advertisers is local credibility with a national buying option. Its pitch to creators is production and monetization support without sanding off the hometown voice.
The 2024 Series B sharpened that position. TEGNA led a $12 million round with Mosaic General Partnership and Bullpen Capital, taking ALLCITY's stated total funding beyond $25 million. The investment came with a commercial agreement: cross-promotion, content licensing, distribution on TEGNA stations and streaming apps, and guest traffic with the Locked On Podcast Network. Capital paid for the next market, Dallas, plus FAST-channel work and management hires. DLLS launched six days after the funding announcement.
BSN starts with six reporters
A website and ad-sales experiment becomes the laboratory.
The format locks into place
Daily shows, memberships, merch, events, and local identity begin working together.
Phoenix, Chicago, Philadelphia
The operating system travels while each market hires its own recognizable voices.
DLLS makes five
The network enters its third top-five U.S. media market with launch sponsors already attached.
A lighter expansion model appears
ALLCITY represents KCSN's advertising and collaborates on content without buying the local company.
What failed first
The uncomfortable answer is not technology. It was coverage whose audience and advertiser demand did not justify the cost. In December 2024, four months after raising the Series B, ALLCITY cut 16 people - about 7 percent of its workforce at the time. Baseball and hockey roles were hit across several cities. Spano said the data showed some of that programming was not resonating closely enough and that shows ultimately had to generate positive cash flow.
The timing, one week before Christmas, produced deservedly rough optics. The strategic signal was still legible. Venture capital had not changed the original brokered-radio rule; it had only lengthened the runway. A show could be editorially sound and loved by a small audience, yet still fail the local equation of daily production cost, reachable fans, and sponsorable demand.
That episode also explains what changed management's mind about expansion. The early dream was to reproduce the entire owned-and-operated machine city by city. The 2026 KCSN deal suggests another route: sell ads for a strong existing local brand, share content, and extend the network without rebuilding every newsroom. It is closer to a platform or representation business, and much lighter than launching a full market from zero.
The moat is not the microphone. It is the habit around the microphone - and habit only becomes a business when the local math works.
The parts worth stealing
For founders, ALLCITY's most portable lesson is sequence. Spano learned to sell before he scaled production. He launched one format, watched demand, and added the next layer. Daily frequency came after a few weekly podcasts worked. Paid membership followed audience growth. Merchandise and events followed identity. Live video followed audio. Outside capital arrived only after Denver had operated for years and the model could be shown rather than imagined.
Copy this, with conditions
- Start with one recurring show around a dense identity, not a broad “content strategy.”
- Sell sponsorship early. Revenue conversations expose weak positioning faster than download charts.
- Centralize operations but leave voice, talent, and rituals local.
- Add membership, merchandise, and events only after the audience has its own language.
- Give every show a time-bound path to positive cash flow and review it by team, not just by city.
The model will not travel everywhere. It needs a city with several teams, enough obsessive fans to support weekday programming, creators who can be both credible and companionable, and advertisers willing to buy host-led media. It struggles when a sport is seasonal, the local audience is thin, or talent has authority but no chemistry. It also needs patient capital: even ALLCITY's profitable Denver operation took years to assemble.
The proof is not that every local podcast should open a bar. It is that the best local media can become a club without pretending to be one. In 2025, ALLCITY reported more than 230 million video views and audio downloads across its five markets. CHGO passed 100,000 YouTube subscribers; DNVR passed 140,000. FAST viewership rose 48 percent. By spring 2026, Spano said the company employed about 140 full-time people and generated annual revenue well above $10 million.
Those numbers describe reach. The stranger facts describe the product. Fans from Serbia and Australia make pilgrimages to the DNVR Bar. A nickname coined on a Nuggets show leaks into the locker room. Viewers donate money to unlock ridiculous on-air stunts, raising more than $15,000 for Big Brothers Big Sisters in a day. This is what ALLCITY sells: not access to the game, but a reliable room to enter once the game gives everyone something to say.