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Take a look at the top 5 webcasters in each of the Webast Metrics charts and you'll see an interesting pattern: Three of the five — largely the fastest-growing webcasters — use numbers as part of their brand names and URLs. (Also, three of the five have a ".fm"extension, but this is probably just a result of the difficulty of securing a two- or three-character ".com" URL.)

Thinking it through, we believe that the recent growth of this new set of leading Internet-only webcasters can be traced directly to one key phenomenon: In the "Radio Tuner" portion of the WindowsMedia.com website, stations are listed alphabetically.

And there seems to be an "arms race" going on among webcasters to leapfrog past each other to make the top of the list.

Anyone who's looked up a towing service or a locksmith or a plumber in the Yellow Pages knows the trick: Businesses at the top of the alphabetical listing get the most calls. (thus, companies with names like A Tow Truck, AA Towing, AAAA Towing, AA-ABABBA Towing, etc.). Even better than the letter A, numerals will appear before letters in an alphabetical list like Microsoft's Windows Media Guide (www.windowsmedia.com).

(The Yellow Pages, by contrast, lists numerals after the "Z" listings.)

In fact, it looks like this arms race for the top spot has been going on for awhile. Check this out: (you may need to use Internet Explorer... I couldn't navigate WMG with Firefox).


At some point, 202.fm — which in the recent past was high on the list — was supplanted in the alphabetical list by 1Club.fm, 1BigMix, and 123Party.fm, all of which were trounced by 1.fm. Sometime around this time, "SoulfulHitz.com" becomes "1.AB — SoulfulHitz.com." "We can top that," 007Radio must have thought, and it did.

Better yet, sometime in the recent past Club 977 has switched its name in the guide listings to ".977" (although without changing its brand name or URL). What next? "Lucky Seven Radio" becomes ".777 Lucky."

Quickly pouncing on a good idea, a series of ".1s" (that's a "1" with a decimal point in front of it) have joined the party. More recently, some ".0"s are starting to leapfrog above the ".1"s.

In a related phenomenon, some webcasters appear to be submitting multiple entries for each of their stations, so that they have multiple channels displayed under each genre. (For example, the "Top 40" section of the guide now includes listings of Eighties stations, Hip-Hop stations, Classic Soul stations, and more — and vice versa.)

It's not clear how much Internet radio listening comes from WindowsMedia.com, but it certainly doesn't hurt to be the first option presented to a consumer actively seeking an option in a particular category (just ask the guys as AAA Towing).

We can't wait to hear the new stream from "....000000001 Radio," which is sure to launch any day now! -- KH & PM
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