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

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Its service also lays the groundwork for fresh marketing initiatives that couldebenefit non-mainstream musicians, said Tim founder and chief strategy Some 85 percent of advertisers are doing repeayt business with Pandora, which recently predicted that it coulfd be profitable next year. This year’s revenuezs are projected to double toabout $40 million, Westergren said. The service has 27 milliobn registered users, 10 million active a month, and is addingy 50,000 to 60,000 a day. “We’re the biggest radio in almostf everymarket already, and we’re doublingy in size annually, so we’ve been hiring fast and furiouslyh to build up local ad Westergren said.
Pandora can target ads by demographics, genre, artisft and ZIP code. It can guarantee a specific number of ad impressions because it delivers the impressionz only when a user has just takenan action, such as givin g a thumbs-up to approve a song choice. The companyh this month began offeringan ad-free premium service for $36 a Santa Barbara-based home music system manufacturer ran a 30-day ad campaigjn targeting exclusively IPhone users from mid-March to mid-Aprip on Pandora, and foundf the click-through rate to be extraordinary. “Fard and away, it was the most successfup campaign we’ve ever conducted,” said Sonos spokesman Thomax Meyer.
Westergren said he decided to makehis company’xs revenue public because advertisers had repeatedly questioned the company’sz health. Pandora has 135 30 of them hiredlast year, a dozen this and another dozen expected to be added by the end of 2009. Most employeesx are in the Oakland and the company has offices in New Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit and Boston. One reason Westergrenh feels so optimistic is thata two-year battld with record companies and artists over how much Internet radio services should pay in royalties may be , which collects royalties for copyrighy owners and is negotiating for the record labels, announced “q potential agreement” with webcasters.
Also, Pandora has been rapidly adopted by IPhone and Blackberryuserw — 5 million in 11 months, abouft 1 million after two months respectively. Now that Pandora is Westergren wants to develop tools tohelp non-mainstream musiciand get money. For Pandora’s user preference data can be plottec on a map for an artist to decide wherseto tour. Pandora could also send emails to fans alerting them to an upcomingy show and offering tickets or merchandisfor sale. Seventy percent of the 650,00o0 songs in Pandora’s library are from artists not signed to arecordr label, he said.
“We give accesds and promotion to this huge sea of reallty talented but otherwiseinvisible artists,” Westergren said.