Well, the Pandora story continues, this time with Techdirt.  The headline reads “Pandora Goes With Old Intrusive Ads To Boost Their New Media Product”.  That certainly does capture what I’m trying to get across with my past few posts, and I’m glad to see it wasn’t lost on them.

I love Pandora, and although I agree that the current ads are only intrusive to a minor degree, I’m worried about backlash to their service if this pilot program goes into full swing.  I ended up writing more than I wanted to in the comments over at Techdirt, but I wanted to share it with my readers as well.

By the way, if you haven’t heard of Techdirt, subscribe to their feed, they’re very good.  They’re responsible to a large degree (in addition to my own reasons) why I’ve decided my organization will never buy Sony products, among other things.  OK, back to the idea of new media monetization vs. old:

While I agree that it is definitely possible to use “old” advertising methods in the new media, I feel this is artificially placing the required negative aspects of monetization on a media where it’s not required.

A simplified example of this can be seen in the domination of iTunes. By making it “grandma-easy” for iPod owners to get music on their iPods, Apple has boosted their revenue in both the hardware and music sales businesses to a height greater than the sum of these products individually.

Apple could easily make a lot of money by selling ads with the music they sell on iTunes, but they don’t. They instead choose to maintain and grow a great service, and take advantage of the efficiencies in their market to add value to ancillary products.

Overall, I think a worthy goal for a new media company like Pandora is to identify the future market and application of online music early enough to be able to define it themselves, instead of taking a great implementation and trying to apply it to a solution that was the product of limitation.

I’d like to state again that behind *.google.com, Pandora easily comes in second, and I have nothing but hope for them that they will find a way to completely dominate a self-defined market. I feel that all they have to do is choose to do so, and they will be well on their way.  I look forward to continuing to broadcast my personalized stream of new music across my office and the adjoining lab.  :-)

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