For years, 97X owner Doug Balogh struggled with his station's weak signal, which barely makes it into Cincinnati.

"If I knew then what I know now, I wouldn't have spent all that money, all those years on all those engineering studies," he says.

The solution: the Internet.

In 1995, the station launched its Web site: www.woxy.com. Since 1998, WOXY has been broadcasting on the Internet, allowing anyone with a PC to tune into the station from anywhere in the world.

It's been a boon to office workers in downtown Cincinnati and Dayton, but it also allows the 20 years' worth of the Tristate's college alumni - the station's core audience - to tune in.

"We get e-mails from Taiwan and dozens of other countries, and that's kind of fun and cute," he says. "But we have huge pockets of listeners in midtown Manhattan, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles."

Balogh estimates that as many as 12 million people in North America "fit the exact profile of the people who listen to the station."

In 2001, 97X's Web page clocked 33,460,341 hits. In 2002, that number soared to 53,193,958. For the first three months of 2003, it was 20,492,391 hits, almost double last year's rate.

Larry Nager