Pandora Ads inserted into Stream
January 9th, 2007 by Casey
So Pandora has finally inserted ads into their stream. It is currently only a trial but I do have some problems with it. Many times when we have people over at our house we put Pandora on and just leave it going in the background. No need to make a mix cd. Now with the ads that you can hear Pandora is turning into just a cool radio station and not something that I care either way about.
I don’t want to have guests hear ads let alone myself when Im doing programming and just want something to listen to. Most of the time ads are annoying, look at the success of satellite radio (ad free). I would pay Pandora up to 20 bucks a year for an ad free version, I use it that much.
Im not sure where I stand on this yet. If it becomes an issue I will test out Last.fm but hopefully Tom and the good guys over there will truly listen to the users.
Another suggestion: Just have the ad be scrolled across like a song but not something that plays, maybe with a 5 second delay. This would allow for more ad space and also allow the user to click the ad if they decide to. Im not sure if the advertiser would actually get much from this though as most of the time Pandora is played in the back ground and isnt seen.
Another suggestion would be when you first load Pandora it says something like ‘Pandora brought to you by…”. That would be fine for me and I would encourage that, all listeners would hear it and as long as it was shorter than 15 seconds it would not interupt things too badly.
**Currently only a few users have seen the ads so this is a very limited test**
Well they do have an ad free version for $36 a year. When i first started listening there was no ads but they said there would be, than i stopped listening for awhile. I than recently went back and started seeing those giant altoid ads, thought it was weird to have a visual ad for audio content. I havent heard the audio ads yet but that must just stink. Than again something has to pay the bills.
Yeah I agree that they need to pay their bills somehow but not sure if the ads actually irritate me that much yet.
The users put a lot of time into getting their stations to play correctly and I’m not going to jump ship that easy. Im hoping for something that works. What if they were acquired by G or Y? That would be a cool value added for those big guys and getting user feedback is something they both find very valuable.
A large user base is always worth something.
I listen to Pandora somewhat regularly but haven’t heard the ads. Do you think they’re on all streams?
$3 a month seems high just to let us avoid ads on Pandora. I agree with you that $20/year is a much better price point. Isn’t Last.fm asking that amount?
From Pandora:
We’ve taken down the McDonalds ad and we’re still digesting our listener’s feedback. It’s likely the case that we’ll run other tests before we can conclusively close the books on the question of audio ads on Pandora.
We really value that our listeners and our advertisers are part of a constructive dialogue about how we best support the site with advertising. Thanks to all of you that participated in this conversation.
We’ll do a better job next time of describing our plans here on the blog in advance of any additional tests. Stay tuned and don’t be shy about weighing in on the issue here or via pandora-support@pandora.com. As always, we love to hear your thoughts on all-things-Pandora.