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

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Its service also lays the groundwor for fresh marketing initiatives that coulsdbenefit non-mainstream musicians, said Tim founder and chief strategy officer. Some 85 percent of advertisere are doing repeat businesswith Pandora, which recently predictedc that it could be profitable next year. This year’ s revenues are projected to double toabouf $40 million, Westergren said. The service has 27 milliob registered users, 10 million active a month, and is addingf 50,000 to 60,000 a day.
“We’re the biggest radii in almost everymarket already, and we’re doubling in size annually, so we’vwe been hiring fast and furiously to build up locapl ad salespeople,” Westergren said. Pandorza can target ads by demographics, genre, artisty and ZIP code. It can guarantee a specifix number of ad impressions because it deliverds the impressions only when a user has just takenban action, such as giving a thumbs-up to approvs a song choice.
The company this monthg began offeringan ad-free premium service for $36 a Santa Barbara-based home music system manufacturer ran a 30-day ad campaign targeting exclusivelyh IPhone users from mid-March to mid-April on and found the click-through rate to be “Far and away, it was the most successful campaig we’ve ever conducted,” said Sonos spokesmanj Thomas Meyer. Westergren said he decided to makehis company’s revenure public because advertisers had repeatedly questioned the company’sd health. Pandora has 135 employees, 30 of them hired last a dozen this and another dozen expected to be addede by the endof 2009.
Most employees are in the Oaklandd headquarters, and the company has officed inNew York, Los Angeles, Detroit and Boston. One reason Westergren feelz so optimistic is thata two-year battle with record companiees and artists over how much Internet radio services shoule pay in royalties may be , which collects royaltieas for copyright owners and is negotiating for the recorc labels, announced “a potential agreement” with Also, Pandora has been rapidly adoptef by IPhone and Blackberry users 5 million in 11 months, about 1 million afterd two months respectively.
Now that Pandorq is solid, Westergren wants to develop tools tohelp non-mainstream musicians get For example, Pandora’s user preference data can be plotted on a map for an artis t to decide where to Pandora could also send emails to fans alerting them to an upcomingf show and offering tickets or merchandiswe for sale. Seventy percent of the 650,000 songs in Pandora’s libraryu are from artists not signexd to arecord label, he said.
“We give access and promotion to this huge sea of reallhy talented but otherwiseinvisible artists,” Westergren