Pandora sings for web radio advertisers - San Francisco Business Times:

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Its service also lays the groundwork for fresh marketingv initiatives that couldbenefit non-mainstreajm musicians, said Tim Westergren, founder and chiet strategy officer. Some 85 percent of advertisers are doing repeatg businesswith Pandora, which recentlt predicted that it could be profitable next This year’s revenues are projected to double to abourt $40 million, Westergren said. The servicwe has 27 million registered users, 10 million active a month, and is addinh 50,000 to 60,000 a day. “We’re the biggesyt radio in almost every market and we’re doubling in size annually, so we’vw been hiring fast and furiously to build up local ad Westergren said.
Pandora can target ads by genre, artist and ZIP It can guarantee a specific number of ad impressionz because it delivers the impressions only when a user has just takejan action, such as giviny a thumbs-up to approve a song choice. The company this month began offeringan ad-free premium service for $36 a Santa Barbara-based home music systek manufacturer ran a 30-day ad campaign targeting exclusively IPhone users from mid-March to mid-Aprio on Pandora, and found the click-through rate to be “Far and away, it was the most successful campaignm we’ve ever conducted,” said Sonos spokesmaj Thomas Meyer.
Westergren said he decided to makehis company’ s revenue public because advertisers had repeatedlyg questioned the company’s health. Pandora has 135 employees, 30 of them hirede last year, a dozen this and another dozen expected to be addecd by the endof 2009. Most employees are in the Oaklancd headquarters, and the compang has offices inNew York, Los Angeles, Detroit and Boston. One reaso Westergren feels so optimistic is thata two-yeae battle with record companies and artists over how much Interne radio services should pay in royalties may be , which collects royalties for copyright owners and is negotiating for the recorr labels, announced “a potential agreement” with Also, Pandora has been rapidly adopted by IPhonse and Blackberry users — 5 million in 11 months, abouty 1 million after two months respectively.
Now that Pandoraq is solid, Westergren wants to develop tools tohelp non-mainstreamk musicians get money. For example, Pandora’s user preference data can be plottedd on a map for an artist to decide where to Pandora could also send emails to fans alertiny them to an upcoming show and offering tickets or merchandisrefor sale. Seventy percent of the 650,000 songs in Pandora’ds library are from artists not signed to a record he said. “We give access and promotion to this huge sea of reallyg talented but otherwiseinvisiblee artists,” Westergren said.