Pandora gets commercials
Audio & Video, Web January 8th, 2007Unfortunately, it looks like 2007 has brought a dark cloud over one of my favorite sites, Pandora.com. While you can still get great music tailored to your tastes (and wonderfully based on music characteristics instead of user demographic averaging), it appears that there are now short audio commercials inserted into your audio streams. You are unable to fast-forward past these commercials.
(click thumbnail for larger view)
Advertising on Pandora is nothing new, but in the past it has been non-invasive. I much prefer the static ads on the page, and even admire the different stylesheets they would use to match the page’s color scheme to the ad. It gave a nice ‘branded’ look to the Pandora page, and in effect labeled the advertiser as the nice people who were bringing you such great music at no cost, monetary or otherwise.
However, now (as seen in the picture) short commercials are now playing in the audio stream, as in this case here for McDonald’s Dollar Value menu. This change has the opposite effect – I now know exactly who is keeping me from hearing my music, both visually and via audio, and casts a negative light on both Pandora and the advertiser.
Please Pandora, no more audio advertising! Keep the (audio) stream unpolluted!
edit: I’ve posted a few alternative ideas for Pandora. Please check them out and let me know what you think!
Entries
January 8th, 2007 at 7:35 pm
Right now the audio ad is just a test — we’ve put it out there to see what our listeners think. It’s running for a limited time, and only a small subset of our visitors are hearing it. There’s just the one ad you heard.
Your responses are just the kind of thing we need to hear during this period; so thanks for posting about this.
There are significant costs associated with delivering Pandora and we have to find ways to cover those costs to be able to continue to deliver the service. We’re always trying to strike the right balance between keeping the site going and not doing anything that takes away from the experience of listening to Pandora.
I really do hope you’ll stick with us as we sort through all of this; we certainly value your feedback.
Tom
CTO @ Pandora
January 8th, 2007 at 9:48 pm
Thanks for commenting Tom. It’s great to hear you’re open to the user experience. I’ve continually told people about Pandora since I started using it, and continue to think it surpasses anything else out there, including iTunes itself in its ability to get great new music to people.
I can understand how hard it is to monetize the site, and hope you guys can find a way to do it without losing Pandora’s pristine musical service.
Best of luck in 2007, and best wishes in finding a sustainable business model that will support Pandora’s great service while keeping its user base.
Let’s turn it out to the lurkers here – give a shout and rattle off a few ways Pandora can make some cash without interrupting the music stream. I’ll do the same and post them up.
January 9th, 2007 at 6:30 pm
I think that this could be a huge issue but one that needs to be addressed if this company is loosing money. I would support paying a small amount to keep it up. Im not where I stand on the ad streaming yet.
Hopefully the ads will not be too intrusive. I can imagine a loud “whoo hoooo, come buy my crap” ad playing in the middle of a slow rock/mellow station and ruining the station completely.
January 10th, 2007 at 12:26 am
[...] Pandora, the music recommendation site that rivals Last.fm, has started testing audio ads – they’re not going down too well. Pandora has been running on-screen ads for a while, and users seemed to accept them as a necessary part of the service. But over the last few days, some listeners have started to notice ads in the audio stream itself – in particular, 9 second ads for the McDonald’s Dollar Value menu. Every post I’ve seen so far has been negative. [...]
January 10th, 2007 at 2:41 pm
[...] Pandora gets commercials [...]
January 11th, 2007 at 1:11 am
[...] GeekLimit and some others have expressed dissatisfaction with the idea of Pandora running ads in the stations we create as users of their free service. Even though I listen to Pandora every day, I only learned about the ads from reading about them on these blogs. I am told that there is one ad per listener each day. This either proves that my internal ad filter is working extremely well or maybe that I am slipping toward dementia at the age of 38 and immediately forgot about the ads as fast as they began to annoy me… So, what was I writing about here? Oh, yeah… bitchy bloggers! First, I’m certain Pandora is open to ideas and will listen to users on this as they do on other topics. They are very innovative and I have seen them respond pretty quickly as they have grown–and MAN HAVE THEY GROWN! Because of massive growth, monetization is probably on the minds of all who consider Pandora to be their business. Yes, Pandora is not only a great idea that will probably change the music world as we now know it but it’s also a BUSINESS. Every user of free online services really needs to accept the fact that a business has to make money in order to continue operations (in this case, users listening to music all day and night for free). Do you support Pandora? I know I do. I don’t mind listening to an ad a day as a free user. To me, that’s more than fair for what I’m getting from them. I can’t imagine what they pay each month for the bandwidth that delivers all that music to so many listeners. The least we can do is to put up with such a minimal advertising block (one per day). [...]
January 11th, 2007 at 8:58 am
I tried to reply on your blog, Shawn, but I’m not going to register to do so…so…
I don’t think the issue was the single ad. Most people are opposed to what it represents: the use of old-world advertising in the new media. People have different theories for this, but I feel it’s just resorting to laziness and the preservation of an ineffective revenue model at the expense of a great product.
I agree that Pandora is great and deserves to have a revenue, but there are better was of doing so than using traditional advertising. After all, traditional advertising is one of many reasons why people are migrating away from traditional media, what sense does it make to bring the negative aspects of the old economy into the new one?
January 15th, 2007 at 6:08 pm
I’ll bet the folks at Pandora are working on something less invasive. I still haven’t heard one commercial on Pandora to date and that may be why I am not as miffed about this as some others seem to have gotten.
In any case, they need to experiment. Maybe this was just a test.
January 15th, 2007 at 8:13 pm
I’d rather see discreetly placed banner ads, or I could deal with ONE audio ad at launch. I might also put up with a nominal ($4.99) sub fee, because they truly have something unique. But don’t mess with my listening experience (although they could add a bit more depth to the songs they play, when I return to one of my artist “stations” I find that it plays the same songs that I heard last time I listened.)
January 16th, 2007 at 12:39 am
For those that didn’t get to hear the ad, it was 9 seconds long and was recorded in NPR-style: “this station brought to you by…”. This “test” ad played for a small fraction of our listeners after they changed channels for the first time. The ad was setup so that no listener heard it more than once per day.
We do offer a $36/year subscription that removes all forms of advertisement from the experience. It’s certainly not our intent to push people out of the free product and on to the subscription version; we want the advertising to be as unobtrusive as possible. Thanks to all for your valuable feedback.
Tom
CTO @ Pandora
January 16th, 2007 at 11:51 am
I love the Pandora listening experience, but I do not like ads. That is why I pay for satellite radio and listen to NPR. I try to get new music from traditional radio, but the ads keep me push buttons.
I would gladly pay for the Pandora service. Does the $36/per year really cover the expenses and profit goals for the company? It sounds too low. My guess is that currently advertising is better for the cash flow.
What about the Sqeeze box or similar devices? Does Pandora receive a portion of the sale?
Mary
– interested fan…………….
January 16th, 2007 at 9:16 pm
We’ve shared some of our thoughts on this topic over on our blog:
http://blog.pandora.com/pandora/archives/2007/01/pandora_audio_a.html
We’ll continue to follow the thread here of course, but we’d also welcome your comments and feedback on our post as well.
This audio ad in question was a test and the dialog that’s taking place now is exactly the kind of thing we need to help us make good decisions about how advertising on Pandora will evolve. Thanks to everyone that’s participated to this point. Looking forward to the continuing discussion.
Tom
CTO @ Pandora
January 31st, 2007 at 2:34 am
[...] that is built on the Music Genome Project (classifying millions of songs to find similarities) has started streaming audio ads into their feeds. In the past, the company has simply placed ads on their website (as well as [...]
February 2nd, 2007 at 8:35 pm
[...] that is built on the Music Genome Project (classifying millions of songs to find similarities) has started streaming audio ads into their feeds. In the past, the company has simply placed ads on their website (as well as [...]
March 3rd, 2009 at 4:44 am
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March 31st, 2009 at 11:42 am
Great info, we DO expect (though) that the ad-supported model WILL work. //keeping our noses down and pushing ahead…
Sincerely,
The Songnumbers Team
PS, we just pushed out BETA 2 of our site!
May 25th, 2009 at 10:32 pm
ad-supported model = very bad idea