Speaking at the Citi Technology Conference yesterday Pandora CEO Joe Kennedy again stated that growth for his company would come from the advertising market and that advertising will be taken from radio. Not only national advertisers but local advertisers as well. "We are confident in our ability to monetize," Kennedy said. We have two significant advantages over traditional radio; visual advertising after a user interaction - eyes are guaranteed to be on the site - and we can target. It's registration based measurability.
Kennedy also said there are two keys to growing revenue via mobile devices. Listeners are getting away from PC device listening, moving more to mobile and companies like Pandora and Clear Channel certainly realize that. Kennedy says "The keys to mobile monetization are the maturation of the mobile advertising market. It's growing but it's still young. We need to increase the amount of visual ads. On the audio side it's the radio advertising revenue we are growing, not just national advertisers but local advertiser also. Kennedy then said in New York City Pandora has more listeners in 18-35 than Z100.
Kennedy told conference attendees that "we are at a tipping point of the transition from broadcast to Internet listening."
(9/7/2011 6:15:19 AM)
Pandora claims to fame is hype.
The CEO claims that they have more youthful listeners than Z100. The truth is he can insist he has more listners than all the radio stations across the US but the numbers don't add up.
We own radio and we're not hearing this at all from listeners. It's more likely that he has people working in backrooms at Pandora opening up numerous Pandora Players from their computers and registering those numbers as being credible.
Some people may tune into Pandora as curiousity seekers but there's no real content. That's why Pandora will never be more than a flash in the pan.
In order to survive Pandora is also going to have to start running a lot of ads otherwise bankruptcy will ensue at some point relatively soon.
In all honesty, I would ask that Radio Ink and others would stop giving the CEO of Pandora an audience. Pandora is not radio and doesn't deserve discussion in this forum.
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