WRESTLING WITH ESPN
AT ANY MOMENT, I’M SURE OF IT, MARTIN FLOREANI IS GOING TO LEAP OUT OF HIS CHAIR, LAUNCH HIMSELF ACROSS THE TABLE THAT SEPARATES US, CLOTHESLINE ME BACKWARD OUT OF MY CHAIR, AND PIN ME TO THE FLOOR. At least, that’s the look in his eyes, a barely contained animal ferocity. It’s not clear whether he combed his hair this morning, he certainly didn’t shave, and he has the kind of fixed stare and clenched jaw that you see on boxers when they meet in the middle of the ring before the opening bell. This, it turns out, is his default expression.
What has Martin so fired up began in May 2006, when he burst into his little brother Mark’s apartment in Austin at 2 a.m., after driving 1,100 miles, brandishing a prototype of a website that would cover wrestling and running—the brothers’ respective collegiate sports—with the same obsessive detail and drama that ESPN bestows on the NFL and NBA. Eight months later, they had their first glimmer of success, when Mark captured on video, in early-morning fog from the back of a noisy pickup truck, the record-breaking half-marathon in Houston by a runner named Ryan Hall, who became a star that day thanks to that video. Despite the decidedly lo-fi footage—big blocks of digital fuzz, overwhelming engine noise—within an hour of publishing, the Floreanis had to scramble to add more bandwidth to handle all the traffic. Die-hard track geeks, says Mark, “never had anything like that.”
Wider success came slowly, but today the brothers’ Austin-based company, FloSports, is one of the most surprising successes in the rapidly shifting sports-media landscape. The company—Martin is CEO; Mark, who’s lankier and easier with a smile, is COO—now has 256 employees and runs 25 web video channels. There’s FloTrack, FloWrestling, FloCheer, Flo Grappling (for Brazilian jiu jitsu)—even FloMarching and FloDance. Industry giant ESPN is bleeding subscribers at an alarming rate (reportedly averaging more than 300,000 per month); FloSports’ subscriptions (which currently cost $150 annually) doubled in the past year, and it’s currently adding 30,000 subscribers
